The Givenness of Things: Essays

by Marilynne Robinson

The new cosmologies open so many ways of reconceiving the universe(s) that all sorts of speculations are respectable now.

So, humanities, farewell. You do not survive Darwinian cost-benefit analysis.

Romanticism and early modern science are strongly associated with the Reformation. Passages like these show how they could have sprung from the same root. An intelligible Creation addressed itself in every moment to every perceiver, more profoundly as the capacities of perception were enlisted in the work of understanding. The most persistent and fruitful tradition of American literature from Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens is the meditation on the given, the inexhaustible ordinary. Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James wrote about the subtle and splendid processes of consciousness in this continuous encounter.

The argument could be made that we are now living among the relics or even the ruins of the Reformation. One relic is a continuing attachment to the Bible that is culturally particular to America, even in the absence of any great impulse to honor the Promethean work of the Reformers by reading it. A ruin may be the respect for one another as minds and consciences that is encoded in the First Amendment to the Constitution and institutionalized in the traditionally widespread teaching of the liberal arts, the disciplines that celebrate human thought and creativity as values in their own right and as ends in themselves.

We tend to break things down into categories that are too narrow.

Isaac Watts wrote of one who teaches that “he should have so much of a natural candour and sweetness mixed with all the improvements of learning, as might convey knowledge into the minds of his disciples with a sort of gentle insinuation and sovereign delight, and may tempt them into the highest improvements of their reason by a resistless and insensible force.”

He recommended the reading of poetry so that one may “learn to know, and taste, and feel a fine stanza, as well as to hear it.”

Now we are more inclined to speak of information than of learning, and to think of the means by which information is transmitted rather than of how learning might transform, and be...

To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

Methodists or Congregationalists into Congregationalists or Methodists or Presbyterians capable of prodigies of selflessness and discipline and generosity. I am and am not of their tradition, a mainline Protestant who has a vested interest in believing they overstated the importance of these singular, threshold experiences, and who takes it to be true that the grace of God works as it will, even gradually, patiently, quietly. This is not by any means to question the authenticity of the visions and passions they passed through, or to suggest that these were anything but enviable.

Their devotion to their purpose is an impressive, if forgotten, proof that, in a great many ways, faith forms life and drives behavior. In their case, it engaged them in truly urgent work, and gave them an extraordinary steadiness of purpose. It made them realists, pragmatists.

The models they proceed from are generally either reactions to environment that are measurable by them, or presumptively delusional states like the intuitions and experiences that sustain religious belief, or that sustain the sense of the self.

My Yale divines believed heroically in a kind of personal agency that allowed them to see and engage reality and to change it, and they did this in the thrall of a kind of visionary experience it would be very difficult to describe in the reductionist terms our science of the mind allows us. They are forgotten historically, perhaps because they and their labors resist description in reductionist terms.

Scientific reductionism, good in its place, is very often used to evade the great fact of complexity.

Alexis de Tocqueville described the emergence in the Europe of his day of “men who, in the name of progress, seek to reduce man to a material being.” He says, “They look for what is useful without concern for what is just; they seek science removed from faith and prosperity apart from virtue.”

Like every Christian moralist since Jesus, he knows love can attach itself to the wrong things, things of the world, things like power and wealth that are usually implicated in exploitation and impoverishment, if the prophets are to be believed. Still it is love he is speaking of, and we understand what he means by it.

Perhaps it is better to say, language reflects a consensus of subjectivities.

There is, experientially, a second self, a self who can wish we would not be afraid of what frightens us, that we would not be angered by what angers us, a self-awareness that regrets an incapacity for the kind of joy the best moments of life should afford us or the kind of compassion circumstance seems to demand of us. As intimate as our emotions are, we continuously stand apart from them, appraising.

It was in reading this text many years ago that I was rescued from the determinist, even mechanistic implications of positivism, a determinism more constraining than either original sin or predestination, the first of these implying to me a realism that profoundly and appropriately complicates the impulse to lay blame, the second entering so far into the mysteries of time and causality that only incomprehension could see it as determinist. There is probably no cruder moral statement possible than to say that people get what they deserve, and this is only truer when rewards or punishments are to be felt everlastingly. So it is reasonable to suppose that other considerations must be in play.

The sobering truth is, however, that these reform movements fall back. They exhaust themselves and trivialize themselves.

But if the reality that lies behind the commandment, that our neighbor is as worthy of love as ourselves, and that in acting on this fact we would be stepping momentarily out of the bog of our subjectivity, then a truth is acknowledged in the commandment that gives it greater authority than mere experience can refute. There is a truth that lies beyond our capacities. Our capacities are no standard or measure of truth, no ground of ethical understanding.

When I say Calvinism has faded, I am speaking of the uncoerced abandonment by the so-called mainline churches of their own origins, theology, culture, and tradition.

But I envy a time when an American president could speak as candidly as Lincoln did, and remind us that whom God loveth he also chastiseth,

I don’t know whether it is time or history or Calvin that has left me so profoundly convinced of the importance of human fallibility, and so struck by its peculiar character.

In the course of achieving this general amity we have virtually erased all sense of the history that gave rise to our many denominations.

The religious monoculture we seem to be tending toward now is not a neutral averaging of the particularities of all the major traditions. It is very much marked by its cultural moment, when the whole focus is on “personal salvation,” on “accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior.”

Theologically speaking, the cosmos has contracted severely.

Those who have crossed this line can be outrageously forgiving of one another and themselves, and very cruel in their denunciations of anyone else. Somehow in their eyes this does not make them hypocrites, a word that for Jesus clearly had a particular sting. And no, this is not Calvinism.

Max Weber saw anxiety in Protestants’—he meant Calvinists’—uncertainty about their own salvation. There are worse things than uncertainty, presumption being one.

Nevertheless, the mainline churches, which are the liberal churches, in putting down the burden of educating their congregations in their own thought and history, have left them inarticulate.

Christianity is stigmatized among the young as a redoubt of ignorance, an obstacle to the humane aspirations of the civilization.

But there appears to me to be a dynamic at work that is new for us, a polarization of the good on one side and the religious on the other, which will be a catastrophe for American Christianity.

Christian ethics go steadfastly against the grain of what we consider human nature.

The first will be last; to him who asks give; turn the other cheek; judge not. Identity, on the other hand, appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses. It is worse than ordinary tribalism because it assumes a more than virtuous us on one side, and on the other a them who are very doubtful indeed, who are, in fact, a threat to all we hold dear.

no boundaries, no shibboleths, no genealogies or hereditary claimants.

depart from me.’” It is for Christ to decide who the Christians are, who has in fact done the will of his Father.

I preach, that the origins of a fiction in the writer’s mind are mysterious. So are the origins of all complex thought, of dreams. Mysteries seem in their nature to invite remarkably convenient solutions, especially as they pertain to human nature or behavior. But some of us are closer to the phenomenon than others. We’re in a position to say, no, that isn’t it at all.