The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

by Marilynne Robinson

In this award-winning collection, the bestselling author of Gilead offers us other ways of thinking about history, religion, and society. Whether rescuing "Calvinism" and its creator Jean Cauvin from the repressive "puritan" stereotype, or considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired by Midwestern abolitionists, or the divide between the Bible and Darwinism, Marilynne Robinson repeatedly sends her reader back to the primary texts that are central to the development of American culture but little read or acknowledged today.

A passionate and provocative celebration of ideas, the old arts of civilization, and life's mystery, The Death of Adam is, in the words of Robert D. Richardson, Jr., "a grand, sweeping, blazing, brilliant, life-changing book."

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Religion, Theology, Christianity

263 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1998

About the author

American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of both rural life and faith. The subjects of her essays have spanned numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't read any of Robinson's well-regarded novels or essays when I came across this collection by accident, misshelved at the library, just a New Yorker review that mentioned she was serious about religion. She is, very (although she calls herself a pagan too). What she is undoubtedly is a scholar. She reads texts closely, and she unhesitatingly criticizes those who haven't bothered to (including Lord Acton, Max Weber, Simon Schama, and Daniel Dennett, all faulted for their misreadings of John Calvin). The introduction to this collection is less an introduction and more a freestanding essay on misinterpretations of Calvin. If the book had a motto, it would be: "We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf – it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give to it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent." (p. 182) Her writing is the opposite of glib: deep, thoughtful, searching. I had certainly never seen Freud compared to Hesiod before ("It is characteristic of Freud to personify abstractions and to attribute to them motive and strategy. I know of no one else but Hesiod who is so inclined to this way of thinking.") She urges us to be moral, but this is not the same as being priggish. Morality means being "loyal in life and behavior to an understanding of what is right and good, and ...honor[ing:] it even at considerable cost to [one:]self." Priggishness is self-righteous and "highly predictable because it is nothing else than a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring." "This is why the true prig so often has a spring in his step. Morality could never offer such heady satisfactions."

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dissenter's point of view of the modern world, and the uncriticized assumptions and biases that it possesses. Robinson's flawless prose doesn't hurt either. Plus, her basic methodology is this:

1) I am a relatively intelligent person,
2) I consider myself capable of reading and understanding those thinkers and authors who have shaped the world
3) rather than reading the partisans who either deify or malign those thinkers, why don't I read them myself, and decide for myself what to think about them?

This is a nice way of pursuing scholarship and scholarly pursuits.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, Marilynne. You made me want to read John Calvin. I only recently decided to read Augustine instead of judging him after reading other people talk about him, and now you've made me want to read Calvin.

Marilynne Robinson has one of the fairest, wisest minds I've ever encountered. When she makes a judgment I trust it, and that doesn't happen all too often. The lady read Marx and Calvin and everyone else. She read the source material. Our culture is throwing away the past with abandon, judging it without the slightest understanding, engaging in internet gawking sessions without knowing what we're discarding. So calmly, so gently she walks by, suggesting we aren't quite where we think we are, that perhaps we've tossed out an approach to knowledge and living that was actually worth something. Oh, it's so unfashionable to say the past matters, that we could learn something from it. Perhaps the fact that it's so unfashionable should make us wonder why we are rushing about so blindly, placing our trust in ever-changing and unstable material objects, and ephemeral cultural trends.

Maybe what makes Marilynne so wonderful to read is that she herself is a real reader, someone who has engaged the past and other minds, who has spent a lifetime reflecting and learning. To read her is to be given a glimpse into this conversation, and I think that is a wonderful thing.

[Bryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe it is wonderful; I have been awfully cranky lately, refusing to finish all kinds of books, and it might be that in two or five or fifteen years I come back to this shaking my head at my earlier blindness.

But right now I am just *so annoyed* by this book, and I will explain three reasons why for my future edification and then stop:

1. An important historical “proof” very current among us now is that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence unconscious of the irony of the existence of slavery in his land of equality. The most ordinary curiosity would be a sufficient antidote to the error of imagining that Jefferson was such a knave or fool as this notion implies. Jefferson attacked slavery as a terrible crime in the first draft of the Declaration...

Okay, yes, I know that Jefferson's relationship to slavery was enormously complex, but what it comes down to (for me) is that all the lovely things he wrote about ending slavery and all the work he did to try to end slavery was done while he held slaves and when he died 130 human beings were sold whom he could have chosen to free. 130 people. Actual people, not words on paper. If Robinson was trying to point out that it was complicated I would be very much cheering her on, but she isn't engaging in the actual complications of it, she's just complaining about a position she claims some people ('us' -- who is this 'us'?) have. Which brings me to point #2...

2. It is not 'rigorous thinking' to claim that an idea exists out there somewhere in the world and set about vociferously attacking it without in any way substantiating your claim. Her taking apart of Acton's views on Calvin -- yes, that was rigorous, because she quotes Acton and then she demonstrates how he was wrong by quoting Calvin. But throughout the portions of the book I read, Robinson takes advantage of passive voice to create a claim ("The idea is very well established now that..." or "They [ideas] are not designed to...") and then she proceeds to take that claim apart, without ever giving any evidence that anyone believes this in the first place. Where is this idea established, and by whom? How was it established? Who else speaks against it? If Darwin's ideas were designed to "veer so predictably toward ugliness and evil," who was it that designed them? Darwin himself? Why isn't she demonstrating this? If people believe that Freud and Darwin "dispelled the gloom of an unvalued present life" (whatever that means), who are those people? And when she says that "Puritan civilization in North America quickly achieved unprecedented levels of literacy, longevity, and mass prosperity, or happiness, as it was called in those days" -- called by whom? This is cheap rhetoric, creating a dark background for Robinson's assertions to explode against like fireworks, but it is not argument because there is only one actual side.

3. Finally and most personally, I despise the use of the first-person plural when the writer really means 'I'. "We are all aware that..." or "We all distinguish instantly between..." or "We all learn..." -- no, I am not part of this 'we' and I am sure many people who might otherwise be interested in Robinson's thoughts and ideas are also not part of her 'we'. I find it bad faith to set oneself up as a defender of humanity and human ideals and all that is good and vital and important in human life, and then address it all to such a narrow 'we' as she seems to be imagining.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautiful book. Marilynne Robinson uses such beautiful language to express herself. I was amazed by these essays. She has a talent for expressing in poetic words ideas that I feel deep down inside but have no idea how to formulate or write down or even explain to others.

This book is a series of essays written at different times, many of them with a theological theme. In this book, she explored the life and writings of John Calvin (which she actually read, contrary to almost everyone - myself included - who has strong opinions of Calvinism yet who hasn't ever gone back to the source) and discussed the nature of Calvinism and Capitalism and how so much of that we have projected onto our erroneous perception of Calvin and his theology. She has almost made me want to pick up a volume of his Institutes and get reading.

She has discussed how in modern times we have neglected the poor and the suffering and although we may say we are Christians and dutifully holding fast to the word, we've forgotten the spirit of Christianity. There are chapters in here on our destruction of the environment as humanity seems to always justify the wants of the many over the needs of the few. She inquires as to what happened to true liberalism and how the politics of the modern day movement seem to be a farce as to what the word really means.

I was only aware of Marguerite of Navarre as a name, not a real person, a real presence in the early days of the Reformation in France. I learned more of Bonhoeffer and the connection between the early McGuffey readers and the abolitionists. It was a fascinating read.

I was moved. Her intellect amazed me. I agreed with her in many things as I understand in my heart what she penned so eloquently. I would recommend this book to anyone who has looked around and thought that there was something wrong with the society we have built around us and who perhaps would like a fresh perspective and something new to ponder.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It seems to me that, when we lost our aesthetic pleasure in the human presence as a thing to be looked at and contemplated, at the same time we ceased to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilization has always before found to be beautiful even when it was also grievous and terrible, as the epics and tragedies and the grandest novels testify. Now when we read history, increasingly we read it as a record of cynicism and manipulation. We assume that nothing is what it appears to be, that it is less and worse, insofar as it might once have seemed worthy of respectful interest. We routinely disqualify testimony that would plead for extenuation. That is, we are so persuaded of the rightness of our judgment as to invalidate evidence that does not confirm us in it. Nothing that deserves to be called truth could ever be arrived at by such means. If truth in this sense is essentially inaccessible in any case, that should only confirm us in humility and awe.”

It is such a pleasure to read essays from the 1990s, essays in which the internet is not mentioned even once. And it is always a pleasure to read from the dense, complex, and beautiful mind of Marilynne Robinson, who here claims space to critique culture and modern American thought. As ever, she is affectionate toward John Calvin and the Puritans and aims to reclaim what good they brought to our moral frameworks.

Favorite essays
- Darwinsim
- Puritans and Prigs
- Psalm Eight
- Wilderness

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marilynne Robinson is SERIOUS about ideas and Christianity and primary texts and the prevailing emptiness of American culture at present and the lightweightness of most semi-intellectuals. I love all this rigor.

And yet... sometimes she seems deliberately difficult. Demanding to the point of obscurity.

[Joseph Kugelmass · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times -- nobody reads good essays about contemporary Calvinism anymore!

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marilynne Robinson is a gift. The common thread through all of these diverse essays (ranging in topic from Darwinism to Maguerite de Navarre with many nods to John Calvin) is her loyalty to them. Its rare for a writer to so fully know their own mind and speak about what is important to her with such authority. She knows her subjects well and she knows the biases that the reader (me) carries with them. After reading this book I felt like I had met many historical figures for the first time. Because of her glowing sentiments I now find myself steeped in Boenhoffer (not an easy feat) and enjoying myself immensely. One of the last essays in the book was on wilderness, and she refers to it as our holy land. The sight and smell of the Palouse (my holy land, my wilderness) grew heavy in my head at this thought and I was so glad that those sacred spaces have another advocate. There is no way my review can provide a comprehensive scope of her essays, and to be honest if anyone reading this is interested in reading her works, don't start with this book. Start with Gilead. Then if that captivated you move onto Housekeeping. Then finally read these essays and be glad.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a measure of success for a single author collection of essays that is subtly different from simply averaging the overall quality of its compositions; an aspect over and above the intent behind the writing that pushes it beyond mere academic effort. It is difficult to define this quality - but the cumulative effect is similar to the sense of 'humanness' I might perceive from someone after a long conversation. There are moments when the conversation's subject fades into the background, and what's left is the pleasure of watching an interesting mind at work. Essayists who fail to exhibit this added dimension, regardless of the caliber of their writing, may, in the end, feel dry and lifeless and unremarkable.

I bring this up because it is my impression that Ms. Robinson achieves this delicate and admittedly vague plateau in The Death of Adam, and it is also what tips the collection from four stars to five. By the time I reached the final pages, I felt as though Ms. Robinson had accomplished with her essays what great fiction often does; to intimate, in a calm and deliberate manner, the foreign landscape of another mind - in this case, hers.

And the striking element of this collection is Ms. Robinson's emphatic support of theology and the church as sources of moral guidance. There should be nothing shocking in this - Christianity as moral inspiration has guided the Western world for well over a thousand years, yet to read a reasonable person advocate it now seems almost controversial. But this is her firm foundation - refreshing actually, to this reader - although she isn't an evangelist, at least not here. Her intention is to 'rescue' historical theological texts and personalities from the disparagement of modern cultural judgment, developed over time on incorrect or unfair readings; and, when the facts are unobtainable, to present alternate, positive possibilities compatible with what is known.

It is in this way that she attacks the modern canards concerning John Calvin, which she deals with in more than one instance, and also in how she revisits the debate between Darwinism and Creationism, and even the source and impact of the McGuffy Readers. Time and time again, she returns to the original texts to draw her conclusions, but no matter what the ostensible subject of any essay, Ms. Robinson's main thrust is, as she says in her introduction, "that the prevailing view of things can be assumed to be wrong, and that its opposite...can also be assumed to be wrong. They (the essays) undertake to demonstrate that there are other ways of thinking, for which better arguments can be made."

This confidence in, and explanation of, possible 'third ways' (or more) is what I found most likable about Ms. Robinson's collection. That, and the inference that it's best to be wary of anyone's interpretation of source materials. Ms. Robinson is included in that 'anyone', although from afar, she strikes me as more reasonable simply because she is less fanatically aggressive. The two default positions for any discussions in this country today seem to be intractable polar extremes, often just as interested in destroying the ideas of others as in promoting their own, and it's a pleasure to read someone capable of realistically defending other beliefs. Discussion of the 'issues' is probably only of limited use no matter what, but it is of no use when the two sides are entrenched in dogma.

The Death of Adam succeeds best when Ms. Robinson sticks to exegesis. It is informative and enlightening, and although she tends to make assumptions that bolster her arguments when the historical record is thin, they are no less implausible than the prevailing postulations. Where it is weakest, in the essays Facing Reality and Family, Ms. Robinson skips too quickly from topic to topic and loses coherence; while in Wilderness, she raises what will probably be the defining legacy of the human race, yet her antidote, or better yet, her course correction, is weak and improbable, and amounts to the breathless exhortation that 'we must do better'.

These minor points aside, I admired Ms. Robinson's forthright opinions and her courage to publish them as they are, instead of launching a defensive first strike on people and positions with which she disagrees. I appreciate that she stands for something, instead of simply against something else. If, in this modern life, the possibility still exists to place discussion and intellect onto a useful plane (of which I am uncertain), it will be by supporting the opportunity for unflinching writers and thinkers such as Ms. Robinson to speak their mind, regardless of how well it fits into our own patterns of belief.

[Joseph Pensak · Rating 4 out of 5]

A defense of John Calvin from the halls of the UIowa Creative Writing Department? The sky is falling.

[Henry Oakley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading a book that isn’t written by Marilynne Robinson is like watching a golf tournament that Tiger Woods isn’t playing in. Is there even a point?

[Timothy Hoiland · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one writes essays quite the way Marilynne Robinson writes essays.

If you’ve read her nonfiction you probably know what I mean, but there’s this thing she does in her commentary on culture and religion—on contemporary moods and frames of mind, especially—where she starts a few miles upstream from where it would occur to you or me to dive in. Time and again she sends us back to the headwaters of historical precedent and primary source material. It’s as if she is warning us: we will fail to navigate our present bend in the river if we misunderstand all the bends that have come before.

Read more at timhoiland.com

[Bronson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose to give this book 3 stars because I am only comparing it to her novels and I enjoyed those more. This was an interesting work and for me it was worthwhile because of one essay, Psalm 8 and that boiled down to one paragraph. There aren't many paragraphs that I would consider merit reading 263 pages just to be able to experience one thought, but for me this is one of those. I'll quote it here and hope that Marilynne Robinson isn't offended that I cite the whole paragraph. See what you think, it may intrigue you enough to pick up the book.

"What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative - event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, and if we were visited by revelation."

[Jessica]

I found this today at the thrift store, and instantly started weeping into a slightly chipped Flushing Fairgrounds commemorative mug. Reading this will be my reward if I somehow manage to produce two papers by Wednesday.

I looooooove you Marilynne Robinson! I can't wait to find out what it is that you have to say.

Booksters will have to wait breathlessly and see if I emerge at the other end a confirmed Calvinist.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best defense--the only defense of Calvinist thought I've ever read. Robinson's lovely long sentences wind you around a thought and drop you easily on the other side. I'd love to talk with someone about her faith-based arguments.

[Longfellow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though this collection of essays is quite different from Robinson’s works of fiction, I suspect that most readers who enjoy her fiction will also enjoy reading her thoughts on various topics, most of them relating to historical and sociological themes. The level of reading is much more challenging in The Death of Adam than in her literary fiction, so one should be prepared for a significant time investment for a 250 page book.

As Robinson writes in her introduction, all of the essays are “contrarian in method and spirit.” And it is this contrarianism that I find most engaging and compelling, partly because Robinson has done the work for me of logically explaining and defending an alternative view, but also partly because my instinctual resistance to some prevailing views has previously been only that, a distrust of the seeming consensus without a clear argument as to why I feel this way, and Robinson has, in some cases, given me logical support for my own feelings. In other cases, she has written in depth about topics I’ve never even considered.

One of the most impressive things about this collection of essays is the way Robinson is able to challenge accepted, dominant views without relying on a tone of anger or combativeness. Each of these essays is complex in its logic and stubborn in its position. She challenges ideas which have become rote in liberal and Christian circles. And while I am not convinced of every nuance of her perspectives, at numerous points I find that her words give strength to the interior voice of dissent I sometimes feel when various views are expressed without apparent examination or question.

Notable content includes her opening essay on Darwinism, a biographical essay on the life and theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and a couple essays on the influence of John Calvin.

Throughout this collection of essays, Robinson is careful to acknowledge the extent of her research and the bias of her perspective. Doing so increases the ethos of her content, and this results in exceptional essays, which provoke two important effects in readers: an increased contextual awareness of various topics and a forced questioning of her conclusions (since they often challenge accepted notions), hopefully resulting in a willingness to ponder and research these ideas in greater depth.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: A collection of eleven essays taking modern intellectual life to task for its cynicism toward its intellectual antecedents.

Anyone who has read Marilynne Robinson’s fiction discovers a view of life framed in older, theological modes of thought that trace back to the Reformation and beyond. Her appreciation for that framework is evident in this collection of essays that takes modern intellectual life to task for its cynicism toward, and often uninformed rejection of these older modes of thought. Much of this is grounded in one of the fundamental premises of Robinson’s thought–go back to the primary sources!

She demonstrates this in an introductory essay where she takes Lord Acton and others to task for misrepresenting John Calvin (or Jean Cauvin, as his name appears in French), often failing to actually read Calvin himself. She returns later in the collection in two essays on Marguerite of Navarre to defend Calvin against charges of religious bigotry and to recover the contribution Calvin has made to democratic ideals. In particular, she addresses the case for which Calvin is most excoriated, that of Michael Servetus, noting that Calvin was not among the civil authorities who sentenced him and that his execution for heresy was the only such to occur in Calvin’s Geneva, mostly because of the troublesome character he had been. She doesn’t excuse the execution or Calvin’s role but tries to set it in a context of a restrained policy, considering the times.

This “contrarian approach” is taken up in her initial essay on Darwinism as she explores the much more brutal human ethic of survival, selfishness, and progress, contrasted with the older one of human dignity as creatures in God’s image, as well as an understanding of human fallenness that does not excuse human evil with socio-biological explanations.

She notes the struggle of modern thought to face reality when confronted by the crises of life that raise profound questions about our existence. She writes of an older way of understanding such things:

“The truth to which all this fiction refers, from which it takes its authority, is the very oldest truth, right out of Genesis. We are not at ease in the world, and sooner or later it kills us. Oddly, people in this culture have been relatively exempt from toil and pangs and death, to, if length of life may be regarded as a kind of exemption. So why do these things seem to terrify us more than they do others? One reason might be that, as human populations go, we are old. A few decades ago the median age was in late adolescence, and now it is deep into adulthood. Midlife has overtaken the great postwar generation. So the very fact that we have, in general, enjoyed unexampled health has brought us in vast numbers into the years when even the best luck begins to run out. This is true of the whole Western world (pp. 81-82).

Two of her essays concern Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William Holmes McGuffey. In the case of Bonhoeffer, we see a contrarian who withstands Nazi ideology drawing on wellsprings of an older faith. In McGuffey, whose famous readers are taken to task for bourgeois values, she observes his associations with abolitionists from Charles Finney to Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Lane radicals of Cincinnati. His readers shaped a consciousness in the American Middle West that had no place for slavery in human society.

This is followed by a delightful essay on “Puritans and Prigs” in which she contends the Puritans were a far more joyful and liberal band that stands in contrast with modern liberal, fish-eating “priggishness’ and that the Puritans understanding of human fallenness makes room for forgiveness and the restoration of people, rather than their outright removal from society. She also challenges, in her essay on Psalm 8 the idea of the “transcendent” that has been such a part of American religious and philosophical thought. She writes”

“So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous” (p. 243).

Whether writing about family or wilderness and ecology, as she does in other essays in this collection, or Calvin, Bonhoeffer, and McGuffey, Marilynne Robinson challenges modern ways of thinking about these issues and persons. Some will no doubt be angered by this, hearing in Robinson a call to return to some former repressiveness. That, I think, is to misread her. I think rather her argument may at times be one of, “are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and substituting the polluted waters and questionable heroes of modernity?” What her essays do is question our intellectual conventions, and suggest that we may not want to believe everything we’ve been told in school.

[Clayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

For at least a century we have diverted ourselves with the fact that it is possible to translate whole constellations of ideas into terms inappropriate to them. And when, thus transformed, they seem odd or foolish, we have acted as if we had exposed their true nature--in its essence, the alligator was always a handbag. We have alienated ourselves from our history by systematically refusing it the kind of understanding that would make it intelligible to us, until we are no longer capable of understanding. Barth says, about theology, "We need to ask ourselves how it has come about that something that did speak once will no longer speak to us. We certainly should not suppress the historical truth that it did speak once."

We don't do our own reading anymore. Most of us, myself included, develop an inane picture of the world from inane summaries of inane books that we know we ought to read, but haven't bothered to because the summary tells us everything we need to know. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a classic example, a book that top men assure is an astute and essential condemnation of Calvinism and American Protestantism as the dour, sex-hating, witch-burning capitalists who intentionally designed every facet of American culture to suck and make you--you, specifically!--unhappy. Well, I am a person in American culture, and I am frequently unhappy in America, the reasoning goes, so this Weber fellow must be onto something. Not that I'm going to read him: why read the argument when the conclusion is already there, in the title? Don't writers exist to perform a kind of service, reducing complex narratives to something digestible for the rest of us?

No! thunders Marilynne Robinson, an American Protestant with a sturdy work ethic but no love for capitalism. Or socialism. Or libertarianism. Or secularism. Or religiosity. Like a good old fashioned exegete, her faith is to the text first, and the God that the text leads towards second. Her collected essays under the title The Death of Adam form a running argument that 1) John Calvin rules, Max Weber drools, 2) modern culture has changed history from a window into the past into a cheap vanity mirror for modern culture, and 3) you have to read books before you have opinions on them, goddammit.

You can see all of that, incidentally, in the passage above from the essay "Marguerite de Navarre," and we have in it the whole Death of Adam in miniature: clear, punchy prose in an American register; a reminder that American writers writing about America to Americans can use fancy SAT words as the foundation of an idea instead of so much tinsel around it; a snappy metaphor to bring that architecture into focus; the hopelessly naive assumption that people might read things before presenting themselves as an expert on it.

That last one is particularly relevant here, as many of these essays are variations on a single, unusual theme: an apology for John Calvin. That's "apology" in the old Greek meaning of "sympathetic description," a point Robinson would trust her readers to understand. Calvin would too, incidentally, as he was instrumental in making Greek (and Hebrew!) important languages in Christian--and therefore, modern--universities. He was also the first major European theologian to encourage marriage on romantic grounds, seeing in the act of love and sex--those things he supposedly despised and wants you to feel bad about--the natural drive that brought tribes, towns, and nations together. He supported the divine right of kings, but also the divinely-willed expulsion of bad kings through the divine agents most favored by God, the poor and huddled masses who lived under him. I could go on. Robinson does, at length and always with clarity and rigor.

The point is that history and literature are always more complicated than others, those others who are usually trying to sell you something or convince you to do something you don't want to do, would have you believe. They have conclusions, and they always find the history they need to support it. "I have no conclusion to offer," Robinson writes, "except that history is very strange and beautiful and instructive in the absence of all conclusion." We should have more books like this, but I know that we can't and we won't have more books like this. For one thing, it would much more work than our usual opinion-pushers and carters of cant are used to doing for their writing; and for another, they'd all be out of work.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go read the collected works of John Calvin. All 59 volumes.

[Nathan Marone]

Though she doesn't touch on it in every essay in this collection, Robinson's main thesis in The Death of Adam is that people make a lot of assumptions about history and historical figures without ever consulting the source material at all. The crime, it seems, is perpetuated by the layperson and scholar alike, with Robinson herself being a (lone?) exception to the horrific reality of historical ignorance. While what she says is true (how many people blame Calvin and Calvinism for all sorts of evils without ever cracking the Institutes of the Christian Religion?), Robinson's pedantry reaches grating levels at various points in this collection, which would be inexcusable if she wasn't such a rich and challenging thinker. And though The Death of Adam is not meant as a scholarly work, I have to wonder if Robinson isn't a little afraid to do real scholarly work. A footnote, for instance, would be a blessing when quotes a beautiful passage of Calving from I don't know where. And speaking of John Calvin, who in their right mind wouldn't read a book-length treatment of his life and thought by Marilynne Robinson? All of the essays had their finer points, but often Robinson affirms the attitudes of the reader she so gently scorns by driving further into her own esoterica. Who among us has the time to pursue the McGuffy Readers? Are we really obliged to read Marguerite de Navarre in order to understand John Calvin? I shouldn't complain, but Robinson flirts with being a hermetically sealed figure who is also capable of majestic prose. It's like keeping a precious jewel in a safety deposit box. What's the point? But then again, Robinson could probably never be Robinson if she didn't spend half her life scouring the dustier corners of American history for us.

But anyway, who can blame her? Robinson remembers, as many of us forget, that history is a human endeavor. We may use it to simplify the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. We may gloss over it so that we have easy talking points. But Robinson seems to know history and all its ideas were lived out by flesh and blood, people made in the image of God. If we disrespect history, if we reduce it to a sorry prop, then we only disrespect ourselves as much as the people who came before us. This notion, which we would do well to remember, has enough value to overcome whatever complaints I have.

Beyond the schoolteacher's admonitions to go back and read Abe Lincoln in his own words, The Death of Adam soars when Robinson gets down to the work of unpacking the lives and literature she so dearly loves. In particular her essay "Psalm 8" foregoes criticism of the reader or society at large for never having read the titular psalm or the resurrection accounts in the New Testament the essay covers. Instead she merely opens these portions of the Bible to us with deft imagination and personal candor. In this essay her vision of non-fiction finally rises up to meet the heights of her fiction work.

I was also very fond of the essays "Darwinism," "Deitrich Bonhoeffer," and "Puritains and Prigs."

[Liz VanDerwerken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marilynne Robinson is one of my very favorite modern writers—as novelist, essayist, and theologian. I have read all of her fiction (some multiple times) and with the conclusion of this essay collection, I just have two more essay collections to go until I'll have completed reading her published oeuvre (!!!). Everything I've read thus far bears rereading; as for her essays, I always feel I've barely scratched the surface of comprehension after one reading, no matter how deliberate and studied.

I love Robinson's fiction the most, but I love her non-fiction as an extension of that—I have found her non-fiction to be much more challenging and cerebral, and thus, a glance into the inner workings of her brilliant mind. Ms. Robinson's essays focus on topics religious, political, social, and often personal, and it fascinates me to see the breadth of her subject matter. I love her wry humor which slips through on occasion and her unabashed way of identifying truth from error. Several of these essays which touched on the political climate of America were interesting; some still felt remarkably current though this book was published in 1998—I am impatiently awaiting her next book of essays (I hope anyway, as her latest "The Givenness of Things" was published in the fall of 2015) which doubtless will touch on 2017-era politics and such.

Favorites: Darwinism, Psalm Eight**, Wilderness*, The Tyranny of Petty Coercion. (Are the asterisks for emphasis too much? I don't even care. I love Marilynne Robinson.)

[Kevin Hu · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Finally, granting that consensus enforcement, and the endless small concessions made to endless small coercions, are no doubt universal in human civilization, they cannot be without cost, precisely because they disable courage." (Pg.263)

Confession: Marilynne Robinson's written rhetorical finesse often astounds me and leaves me speechless. The Death of Adam not excluded. These essays can be read separately as fluidly as they can be read together. In reading them together, she strings you along to a sort of chronological development of modern thought beginning with the entire school of conjectured thought of Darwinism. In brief( though Robinson does not seem to be much of a fan of reductionist summaries), Robinson provides a meta-critique - a critique of modern thought, in all of its major movements and consensus, as uncritical. Indoctrination is thinking to which a coward would aspire. Critical thinking requires courage, because the conclusions are beyond conjecture, they are objective, scrutinized, beautiful, and true. They may even be deserving of human martyrdom. Robinson attempts, in so many words, to rescue thinking because she is attempting to rescue morality within human civilization.

Even though I think that Robinson's task is far to monumental for any 263 pages, and that the arguments for each 'movement' she attempts to critique are more endless than she gives space for, this piece of work is still deserving of a 5 in my book.

[Derek Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest authors and thinkers of our generation. We would all be better for learning from her.

Darwinism

The title comes from this line- “It is a thing that bears reflecting upon how much was destroyed when modern thought declared the death of Adam.” Robinson is asking in her first essay, how much was lost when we as a culture took the side of ‘darwinism’ over the worldview of God?

Darwin’s language of the survival of the fittest had more of an affect on 20th century eugenenics and racism than people let on. “This sort of language is a reminder of the kind of thinking that was going on in Europe at that time, which Darwin’s cheerful interest in the extermination of races, and his insistence on ranking races in terms of their nearness to the apes, could only have abetted.”

“Surely it is fair to say that science is to the ’science’ that inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the ‘christianity’ that inspired Crusades. In both case the human genius for finding pretexts seized upon the presitgious institution of the culture and appropriated a great part of its language and resources and legitimacy. In the case of religion, the best and the worst of it have been discredited together. In the case of science, neither has been discredited. The afire in both instances to distinguish best from worst means that both science and religion are effectively lost to us in terms of disciplining or enlarging our thinking.”

“People spend a great deal of money for the advantages of being perceived to have spent a great deal of money. These advantages are diminished continuously by the change of styles either toward or away from the thing they have bought, which make it either commonplace or passe.”

Facing Reality
“As a culture we are terrified of illness, though as people go we are rather safe from it. Perhaps to feed our anxiety, illness for us has overspilled definition and is now to be discovered everywhere, in everyone. Emotions are regarded as symptoms and treated medically, including, of course, anxiety. This is true when while the boundless resources of the society seem largely bent to the work of stimulating fear, disgust, resentment,- emotions that in fact are pathological and also pathogenic. It is as if we took morphine to help us sleep on a bed of nails. Another generation would have looked for another solution.”

Family
In discussing how few people would choose their relatives as friends “it implies that help and kindness and loyalty are owed where they are perhaps by no means merited. Owed, that is, even to ourselves.”

“The antitode to fear, distrust, self-interest is always loyalty.”
“Love is loyalty. I would suggest, in its absence, all attempts to prop the family economically or morally or through education or otherwise will fail. The real issue is, will people shelter and nourish and humanize one another? This is creative work, requiring discipline and imagination. No one can be scolded or fined into doing it, nor does it occur spontaneously in the demographically traditional family.”

“When the state attempts to instill morality, the attempt seems intrusive and even threatening precisely because that work has traditionally been reserved to family, community, and religion.”

“The sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer”

Bonhoeffer
“Bonhoeffer’s life and his thought inform each other deeply. To say this is to be reminded of the strangeness of the fact this is not ordinarily true.”

“religion’ in the invidious sense common to Barth and Bonhoeffer, exists when, in Barth’s words, ‘the divine reality offered and manifested to us in revelation is replaced by a concept of God arbitrarily and willfully evolved by man.”

“He says that although as Luther taught faith is prior to obedience, in effect the two are simultaneous, ‘for faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience.”

Puritans and Prigs
Robinson goes to bat for church history Calvinists and Puritans. One of her main points is the ‘elites’ of today act no different than the worst of the Calvinist/Puritan church history and election, when properly understood, destroys elitism. If election is based on no merit, it crosses all lines of socio-economic division.
“I think because our zealots subscribe to the conversion myth, they can only experience virtuousness as difference. They do not really want to enlist or persuade- they want to maintain difference…. Certainly they are not open to other points of view.”
“While Calvinists spoke of an elect, Leninists and suchlike have spoken of an elite. The two words come from the same root and mean the same thing. Their elect were unknowable, chosen by God in a manner assumed to be consistent with his tendency to scorn the hierarchies and overturn the judgments of this world, our elites are simply, one way or another, advantaged.”

The tyranny of petty coercion
She ends this book of essays discussing the tragedy of people being coerced into silence or viewpoints based on political and social pressure. This feels prophetic with where we are in 2022.
“I am very critical of liberalism, not in principle but a s movement. This distinction seems never to be made, and it is not at all subtle. As a principle, liberalism is essential to the sanity and humanity of this civilization. As a movement, it is virtually defunct.”
“The question has been put to me very directly: am I not afraid to be associated with religious people? These nudges would have their coercive effect precisely because those who want to put me right know that I am not a fundamentalist. That is I am to avoid association with religion completely or else be embarrassed by punitive association with beliefs I do not hold. What sense does that make? What good does it serve?”
“Cultures commonly employ the methods of cults, making their members subject and dependent. And nations at intervals march lockstep to enormity and disaster. A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.”

[Isabella Leake · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw a quote* of Marilynne Robinson's that seemed so insightful and so innovative (and so true) that I searched out the book that it came from. Devouring the first half of the book, I became convinced that Robinson was a writer of uncommon—even uncanny—insight. She repeatedly hits the nail on the head in ways I would never have imagined, offering not just small insights into modern thought but enormous, far-reaching ones.

One brilliant thread of thought, introduced in the Introduction and running throughout the essays, is that we tend to adopt, unthinkingly, a "received" understanding of history that is at odds with our personal experience of the world, a Christian worldview, and human dignity or even decency. I was fascinated to see her explore this idea and to realize that even I—devotée of the past and critic of modernity though I am—have not been exempt from this way of thinking.

It was a heady experience to read the first several of these essays, especially her long essay on Darwinism. She carefully and creatively—with lots of textual analysis—lambasts both Freudian and Darwinian thought (its Malthusian social dimensions, not its scientific dimensions) for offering an ugly, unenchanted, unethical, untrue vision of nature and man. I also greatly enjoyed the essay on Bonhoeffer (finding it more impressive than Bonhoeffer himself when I sat down to read Life Together) and on the McGuffey readers. Other essays offered nuggets, like her take on why contemporary fiction is the way it is (it comes down, once again, to accepted modes vs. unauthorized ones).

But midway through the collection, I had an epistemological crisis. I started reading an essay—ostensibly on Marguerite de Navarre, really about John Calvin**—aloud to my husband on a road trip, and he disagreed with a point she made. Suddenly, I was thrown into a quagmire of doubt that Robinson was in fact as insightful as I believed. Was I mistaken? Was my husband mistaken? Whom should I trust? I actually put the book aside for several months, because my uncertainty made it too uncomfortable to read. The book had lost its savor.

I pulled it out again in the new year, determined to count it as part of my 2024 reading and with renewed interest in the remaining essays. I decided I would just have to be willing to take Robinson (and even my husband) with a grain of salt on occasion. I'm glad I did! The essay "Marguerite de Navarre, Part II" was surprisingly enriching. And then, in what felt like a poetic reversal of fortune, Joseph got so excited about the bits of "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion" and "Puritans and Prigs" I shared with him that he took pictures of the pages and expressed as much admiration for Robinson as I had ever done.

(We still felt uneasy about the John Calvin essay but agreed that we probably couldn't disagree too strongly, with Robinson or each other, without doing extensive research on him, which neither of us is interested in doing.)

* "Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone's benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus." (p. 153)

** already a somewhat controversial figure in our house

[Greg Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robinson has me right where she wants me... which is with her books routinely parading through my amazon cart.

The initial essay on Darwinism was a bit of a slog. The set of essays might be stronger without it — in fact it almost pushed me to give it a 4 —, but it sets up the general trajectory of the book, which is that we have largely "taken too high a hand with" the ideas of history, assuming that they have percolated down to us purely. She takes Darwin and Darwinism therefore to task.

The remainder of the book was almost too enjoyable. In particular, the two essays on Marguerite de Navarre (or in truth on John Calvin (Jean Cauvin) and her potential influence on him). The autobiographical chapter, Psalm 8, was enthralling to me. A few quotes that I'll be chewing on for some time:

“But it seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him, and long before I knew words like “faith” or “belief.” I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy or intention, all around me, barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it.”(228-229)

“Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded and, for all that, opaque as figures of angels painted on gold.” (229)

“By the standards of my generation, all my life I have gone to church with a kind of persistence, as I do to this day… My tradition does not encourage the idea that God would find any merit in it. I go to church for my own gratification, which is intense, though it had never occurred to me before to describe it to myself.” (230)

“Therefore, I know many other books very well, and I flatter myself that I understand them — even books by people like Augustine and Calvin. But I do not understand the Bible. I study theology as one would watch a solar eclipse in a shadow. In church, the devout old custom persists of merely repeating verses, one or another luminous fragment, a hymn before and a hymn afterward. By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed.” (230-231)

There is an essay to be written, someday, on Robinson's Cauvin.

[Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps it is because my sympathies lie with Calvin and Edwards that I find Marilynne Robinson to be a gift to American letters. Or perhaps it is because I admire well-formed prose and thoughtfulness and charity towards the past. Likely, its for all these reasons.

MR is a writer and thinker (aren’t they the same?) of the first-degree. This is a stellar collection of essays.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sharp collection of essays. The introduction calls them contrarian and they are. Robinson never bows to consensus, is never cowardly in her choice of topics. If those choices do not always seem timely (especially the focus on Calvin), they certainly engaged me. Aside from Calvin she also addresses the Puritans (a favorite topic of mine - her discussion of modern priggishness as opposed to the Puritan vision of life is a delight), the loss of the humanities, and the modern rule of economics (from the vantage of both Calvin - v. Weber - and Darwin). The title of the book comes from the essay "Darwinism," which ranges over 19th c. thought and the narrowness of vision (moral, creative, social among others) created by Darwinism. Other topics include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, abolitionists (where her history could be sharper, especially as she is writing about deficiencies in historical writing), the environmental crisis and the coercion of consensus (specifically in the denigration of the word liberal which she wants to rehabilitate). These essays are full of beautiful and arresting ideas, paragraphs and sentences. Sometimes the entire essay does not hold together as well as I could wish - instead of a complete argument there are assertions, beautifully made, and numerous digressions. They are not as complete as the essays of Wendell Berry or Joseph Epstein. But that does not mean they are not enjoyable, full of fresh thought and bold words arrestingly arrayed. Quite wonderful.

"Economics, the great model among us now, indulges and deprives, builds and abandons, threatens and promises. Its imperium is manifest, irrefragable - as in fact it has been since antiquity. Yet suddenly we act as if the reality of economics were reality itself, the one Truth to which everything must refer. I can only suggest that terror at complexity has driven us back on this very crude monism. We have reached a point where cosmology permits us to say that everything might in fact be made of nothing, so we cling desperately to the idea that something is real and necessary, and we have chosen, oddly enough, competition and market forces, taking refuge from the wild epic of cosmic ontogeny by hiding our head in a ledger book."

"Creationism is the best thing that could have happened to Darwinism, the caricature of religion that has seemed to justify Darwinist contempt for the whole of religion. Creationism has tended to obscure the fact that religion - precisely as the hope of the powerless and the mitagtor of the abuse of the weak - has indeed come under determined attack by people who have claimed the authority of science, and that Darwin's work was quite rightly seized upon by antireligionists who had other fish to fry than the mere demystification of cosmogony. I am speaking, as I know it is rude to do, of the Social Darwinists, the eugenicists, the Imperialists, the Social Scientists who showed such firmness in reshaping civilization in Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and, yes, of the Nazis."

"Lately Americans have enjoyed pretending they are powerless, disenfranchised individually and deep in decline as society, perhaps to grant themselves latitude responsible people do not have or desire."

"Our collective fiction is full of anxiety, empty of humor and generosity. It elaborates itself in the manner of phobia or delusion rather than vision or fancy. We find comfort in anxiety because it engrosses our attention, which we have in surplus and are usually at a loss to employ."

"As a culture we are terrified of illness, though as people go we are rather safe from it. Perhaps to feed our anxiety, illness for us has overspilled definition and is now to be discovered elsewhere, in everyone. Emotions are regarded as symptoms and treated medically, including, of course, anxiety. This is true even while the boundless resources of the society seem largely bent to the work of stimulating fear, disgust, resentment - emotions that in fact are pathological and also pathogenic. It is as if we took morphine to help us sleep on a bed of nails. Another generation would have looked for another solution."

"There are things for which we in this culture clearly are indebted to [Calvin:], including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling, and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in the 'humanities.' All this emanated, for our purposes, emanated from Geneva - in imperfect form, of course, but tending then toward improvement as it is now tending toward decline."

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all, this is probably an objectively 5 star book but due to a few slogs through one or two of her essays, I personally am saying 4... I really enjoyed it, so many great thoughts captured, I'll include a few in this review. One other criticism I had was her complete lack of criticism or objectivity at looking at her religious and theological upbringing and current process. She critiques everything else but doesn't show anything close to a critique and there were a few things that I felt were strange in her thinking or relationship towards her protestant theology and/or religiosity. Saying that, she is from Idaho and positively spoke of the Mormons or at least neutrally without any angst, so that is always something... :)

Here are some great excerpts:

We have forgotten the democracy was intended as a corrective to the disasters visited upon humanity by elites of one kind and another. Maybe the great drag on us all is not the welfare mother but the incompetent engineer, not the fatherless child but the writer of mean or slovenly books. When out great auto industry nearly collapsed, and elite of designers and marketing experts were surely to blame. But the thousands thrown out of work by their errors were seen as the real problem. No doubt many of these workers figure among the new lumpenproletariat, as the Marxists used to call them, people who just are not bright enough.

... But my point here is that regrettable changes in our economy may not simply express the will of the market gods, but may instead mean something so straightforward as that those whose decisions influence the economy might not be good at their work. If they were brighter, perhaps no pretext would ever have arisen for these than ungracious speculations about the gifts of the powerless and the poor.
Why does society exist, if not to accommodate our lives? Jefferson was a civilized man – clearly it was not his intention to send us on a fool's errand. Why do we never imagine that the happiness he mentioned might include a long supper with our children, a long talk with a friend, a long evening with the book? Given time, and certain fading habits and expectations, we could have comforts and luxuries for which no one need be deprived. We could nurture our families, sustain our heritages, and, in the pregnant old phrase, enjoy ourselves. The self, that dear and brief acquaintance, we could entertain with a little of the ceremony it deserves.

Democracy is profoundly collaborative. It implies a community. It seems to me we have almost stopped using the word in a positive sense, preferring "capitalism, "which by no means implies community, and for which, so far as I have seen, our forebears found no use at all. It is possible to imagine that, in a society where democracy was the thing valued and longed for, there could be a reasonable presumption that people would wish to act toward one another in good faith, to promote, as they used to say, the general welfare. That would no doubt go far toward ensuring the wholesomeness collective passions.

A great many of us, in the face of recent experience, have arrived with a jolt at the archaic–sounding conclusion that morality was the glue holding society together, just when we were in the middle of proving that it was a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills. It is not easy at this point for us to decide just what morality is or how to apply it to our circumstances. But we have priggishness at hand, up–to–date and eager to go to work, and it does a fine imitation of morality, as self-persuaded as a Method actor. It looks like morality and feels like it, both to those who wield it and to those who taste its lash.

For a long time we have used dichotomies, good people/bad people, good institutions/bad institutions, capitalist/communist. But the universality of self – deceptive and self – destructive behavior is what must impress us finally.

If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think. That is, they short–circuit the functions of individual judgment in obviate the exercise of individual conscience.


There you have it, some of the passages that most impressed and moved me and caused me to think and interrogate my consciousness.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great prose, backed with some good ideas and some dubious ones. Robinson makes sweeping generalizations that'll rub you the wrong way if you have any 'intellectual' pretensions at all, as I do, but most of them are fairly accurate. Her hope with this book is that her readers will go back to the study of history, or rather, the history of ideas, and take it very seriously. The problem is that the study of the history of ideas she seems to prefer is a little, well, tendentious: the 'truth' about Calvin is to be found *only* in his own writings, for instance, and the same goes for the American Founding Fathers and everyone else. Robinson seems unwilling to even consider the possibility that the rich and powerful are rather more likely to be liars, self-deceived, or both, and that specific historical circumstances have a huge influence on ideas in general.
This is part of a larger picture that she gives us in her essay on Darwinism and, more abstractly, in 'Facing Reality.' The idea there is that we've constructed a 'reality' for ourselves which ignores a number of very important and very real facts, both historical (Calvin) and contemporary (in short, the civilizing instinct). This 'realism' ends up ignoring or downplaying anything that can be considered a subjective experience: religion, of course, but also art, morality, compassion, altruism... A prime way of downplaying these experiences is to show how they've been used in the service of evil, so that 'religion' is identified with, say, 'the crusades,' rather than with Bonhoeffer. Her call to the study of ideas is meant to defend our cultural ideals from being identified with evil in this way, to suggest rather how we can identify the good in those ideals.
Occasionally she gets carried away with an idea and lets it ruin her argument, as for instance when she complains about people trying to overcome the causes of our discontent. "Might we no all have been kinder and saner," she asks, "if we had said that discontent is our natural condition?" Well, you might want to ask the following groups of people about that: serfs, slaves, the nineteenth century working class, the populations of colonized countries, the contemporary inhabitants of nations run by religious or military tyrants. In all of these cases "the obstacle to collective happiness" is indeed other people, but this belief did not and does not mean that "terrible things seem justified." In the rest of her essays Robinson stresses the need to overcome social injustice; why does she stoop to knee-jerk conservatism here? Because she doesn't like political correctness; because she rejects the idea that history and culture are "a vast repository of destructive notions and impulses." Well, I don't like PC, and I don't think history and culture are that, but that's not a reason to reject all social reforms.

I highly recommend the essays on the family, Bonhoeffer, Wilderness (mainly awful, actually, but leads to a very intelligent conclusion) and Darwinism. Unless you're jonesing for a defense of Calvin in the face of Whiggish, nineteenth century scholarship, you can probably skip 'Marguerite de Navarre.' Psalm Eight is autobiographical, and I think tedious, but maybe you like that kind of thing. The introduction just makes Robinson sound like someone who doesn't bother to read the books she's attacking, particularly Weber (whose point was that capitalism is just as much a subjective attitude as an objective fact, and that the praise of material success underpinned by theology was very good for the development of that subjective attitude; his point was not 'Calvin sucks, man.' This is another problem of Robinson's approach to ideas: Weber was engaged in a very serious intellectual dialogue, of which this book was a small part. It is important only in the context of that dialogue; if you want to complain about idiotic readings of his book, fair enough, but that's not his book anymore than witch burnings is Calvin's.)

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a tribute to how compelling Marilynne Robinson is that when I finished this book, moved and discomposed, one of my first thoughts was that I could now turn to her novel Home.

Robinson says so much that rings true in these essays that it is a little frustrating that they aren’t more formal. Convinced by many of her arguments, I cannot cite them for any proposition because they are, at times, meandering or disjointed. As its title suggests, this is a book that is about human exceptionalism, at least in large part. Implicit in some of Robinson’s arguments is the point that even people who would disavow human exceptionalism on principle rely on it because our entire perception of the world is wrapped up in what is unique about us as a species, but Robinson careers between the particularized experience of being human and its largest implications, for the globe and the future of human society, so it is probably a mistake to argue that this is the animating theme of her essays.

At times, Robinson makes the reader do too much work because she relies on novelistic drift more than argument—her gist is easy to agree with in the abstract but might have more force if she explained herself more directly. For instance, in discussing the influence of Genevan democracy on colonial New England, she writes that New England’s difference from the South “despite shared origins and language, argue[s] that powerful political models and values can be transmitted actively as ideas, through writing and example.” Fine. And I agree that the model of New England democracy, however it relates to European Continental examples, is more than readily distinguishable from the tortured Marxism-cum-Stalinism that Robinson criticizes a few chapters before. As to twentieth century ideologies, Robinson says “the idea that society can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilize society in its goodness” is “an unsystematic, uncritical and in fact unconscious perfectionism.” Her point that utopian social engineering always fails because it misconceives the problem (in Robins’s lexicon, man’s fallen state) is apt enough, but utopian social engineering, too, depends on the transmission of ideas, whether spoken or written. If her point is that we should take seriously the idea that we can critically examine governmental models to achieve more just institutions, that’s fine, but I wish she would make the distinction between the propagation of ideologies and the development of civic discourse, rather than leaving it to the reader. As it is, it seems sometimes that Robinson stops delivering a jeremiad only to start rambling.

Another problem with Robinson’s flitting between polemic and historiographical/historical criticism is that the reader has to take her at her word a lot. Her most historically grounded discussions don’t suffer from this problem because dates are precise and readily verifiable. Her observations about the cost of the erosion of the Sabbath, though, includes this jibe at defenders of market laws: “No one is more persuaded of the rightness of this course than those who claim to especially cherish the family.” Her observation is likely accurate, but to take it seriously we either have to agree with her already or have great faith in her reportage.

These complaints, though, are just evidence of Robinson’s power to persuade and fascinate—the oddness, and at times apparently arbitrary selection of, these essays is frustrating only because they are otherwise so successful.