The Givenness of Things: Essays

by Marilynne Robinson

the spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. In such an environment the humanities do seem to have little place. They are poor preparation for economic servitude. This spirit is not the consequence but the cause of our present state of affairs. We have as good grounds for exulting in human brilliance as any generation that has ever lived.

The physicality enshrined by the neuroscientists as the measure of all things is not objectivity but instead a pure artifact of the scale at which and the means by which we and our devices perceive. So to invoke it as the test and standard of reality is quintessentially anthropocentric.

The movement that preceded the Reformation and continued through it was one of respect for the poor and oppressed—respect much more than compassion, since the impulse behind it was the desire to share the best treasure of their faith and learning with the masses of unregarded poor whom they knew to be ready, and very worthy, to receive it.

Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and, since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible. And from time to time it has the extremely negative consequence of encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat. If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on the other, it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism—exactly the same grounds, in fact—that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another’s. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

Prayer opens on something purer and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.

Almost from its beginnings Christianity has attempted to reconcile the indubitable virtue of many great pagans with the fact that they seemed to fall outside the scheme of salvation. But these particular pagans were not virtuous, so Shakespeare has set himself an interesting variant of the problem. Let us say that he was exploring another thought, controversial in his time, that the Greek agape, traditionally translated into Latin as caritas, or charity, actually meant love. This change is reflected in the Geneva Bible, which Shakespeare knew well. However close caritas may have been to agape when Jerome flourished, “charity” had drifted a very long way from “love” in early modern English, a distance still marked in our own usage. And what we learn at the end of this play is that Antony and Cleopatra really do love each other. This might seem trivial. But Thomas More pointed out that the word “love” could refer to a commonplace, even base, human emotion and relationship. Granting his point, then Scripture would seem intentional in its permitting this association to be made. The note on 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, in the Geneva Bible says that in “the life to come … there at length shall we truly and perfectly love both God, and one another.” And perhaps Antony and Cleopatra participate in this greatest of the theological virtues, the one that makes conditional all the others, even faith. Certainly this understanding would resolve the anomaly of the implied exclusion of ever...

It is this second self, always tacking against the impulses in us that are least acceptable to us, which makes us feel, quite rightly, that others never know us as we really are.

As in the matter of the water drop, theologians often had appropriately hyperbolic notions about the nature and reach of Creation, expressing them long before physicists could begin to confirm them or were disposed to. This aside, for them the theological universe had a grand moral architecture as well. Reality was structured around good and evil, humankind being uniquely capable of both. There was no greater scale than this architecture by which reality could be measured, even granting as they often did heavens beyond heavens. Let us say that human beings would have proceeded from a sound intuition of this moral structure if they had fed the hungry, clothed the naked, given drink to the thirsty, and, needless to say, beaten their swords into ploughshares. Clearly this would have gone far toward assuring the long-term viability of the planet, an argument for a high order of objective facticity behind teachings whose truth value is routinely slighted when it is not dismissed outright. If we had not heard these verses as poetry or as piety, to the extent we have heard them at all, we’d have a much sounder basis for dealing with reality, from the point of view of peace and human thriving, and might not now be so starkly confronted with the alternative realities of war and disease. Here history has made a more irrefutable proof than science could ever dream of.

There is a very strict principle of selection at work here, which looks rational to us, being strict. Obviously, to invoke the will of God to explain anything, to the exclusion of other ways of accounting for it, would be to disable the knowledge-acquiring, problem-exploring brilliance that for Calvin and his tradition were proof of the existence of the human soul. But for the positivist model of reality humanity itself is not really a given. Indeed, the positivist exclusions of articulate experience, the report we make of ourselves, is as rigorous as its exclusion of theism. This is generally accepted as something objectivity requires, but as strong a case could be made that it is a thing objectivity forbids.

There is more reverence, intended or not, and in any case more awe, in the hypotheses that ponder unperceived dimensions and abrupt cosmic inflation than in the construction of these temporally tiny models of reality which reject the freedom of God to act as mysteriously as his nature assures us he would do, as observation assures us he has done. Where were they when he laid the foundations of the earth? Extrapolation always entails presumption.

Only when we are presented with an astonishment of some sort, a threat or an insight, are we inclined to realize that a moment is potentially capacious and transformative, and that we are subject to time far otherwise than in the most predictable of events, our mortality.

the primary condition of our existence is a mystery as virginal as it has always been.

If it would be illiberal and unchristian of me to suppose that divine judgment might be brought down on the United States for grinding the faces of the poor (despite all the great prophet Isaiah has to say on the subject), I take no comfort from the certain knowledge that my opposite is struggling with just the same temptation, though mulling other texts.

in the last few decades a profound, if relative, change has taken place in American society. No doubt as a consequence of a recent vogue for feeling culturally embattled, the word “Christian” now is seen less as identifying an ethic, and more as identifying a demographic.

The temptation has always been to hold affirmations of this kind up to given reality and then declare the two of them irreconcilable, the faith statements therefore unsustainable, weighed and wanting. This is to deny the ethical meaning of such affirmations. Sigmund Freud said we cannot love our neighbor as ourselves. No doubt this is true. 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.

Lincoln spoke in Calvinist language to a population it might have been meaningful at the time to call Calvinist, as the historians generally do. He says, Accept suffering with humility. Both suffering and humility will serve you. This apparent fatalism is actually confidence that life is shaped by divine intention, which will express itself in ways that can be baffling or alarming but that always bring an insight, pose a question, or make a demand, to the benefit of those who are alert to the will of God. The activism, even radicalism, of this tradition is inscribed very deeply on modern and American history. At the same time it was characterized by a striking inwardness, based on an immediate, an unmediated, conversation between the Lord and the individual soul. God’s language in his discourse with humankind was taken to be experience, personal and historical, intellectual and sensory, emotional. All this yielded some good novels and some fine poetry. It created a number of excellent universities.

I wouldn’t mind hearing the word “sin” once in a while. If the word is spoken now it is likely to be in one of those lately bold and robust big churches who are obsessed with sins Jesus never mentioned at all. On the testimony of the prophets, social injustice is the great sin—according to Ezekiel the reason for the destruction of Sodom. Oh, well. The Old Testament is so, you know, Calvinist.

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. The simple, central, urgent pressure to step over the line that separates the saved from the unsaved, and after this the right, even the obligation, to turn and judge that great sinful world the redeemed have left behind—this is what I see as the essential nature of the emerging Christianity. 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. Calvin would have called it salvation by works, which for him was anathema. As corollary, his famous predestinarianism forbade the passing of judgment, since such matters must be left to God’s inscrutable will. Max Weber saw anxiety in Protestants’—he meant Calvinists’—uncertainty about their own salvation. There are worse things than uncertainty, presumption being one.

When Martin Luther King was preaching to us all, there was a strong enough sensitivity among the public to the language he spoke in to stir deep assent, the recognition of truth in what he said that made the reality he spoke from and to appear as it was, mean and false. But he was a reverend doctor after all, learned in the difficult disciplines of historic Christianity, brought up in the richness of the black church. His educational attainments would no doubt disqualify him from respectful attention in certain quarters now, as President Obama’s do him.

Every defense of Christianity is nonsense while in one way or another its loyalists are busy cutting it off at the root. I’m speaking here of the partisans who use it to put a lacquer of righteousness over fearfulness and resentment, and I’m speaking here of the seminaries that make a sort of Esperanto of world religions and transient pieties, a non-language articulate in no vision that anyone can take seriously.

I have mentioned the qualitative difference between Christianity as an ethic and Christianity as an identity. 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. Western civilization is notoriously inclined to idealize itself, so it is inclined as well to forget how recently it did and suffered enormities because it insisted on distinctions of just this kind. If the claims to Christian identity we hear now are rooted in an instinctive tribalism, they are entirely inappropriate, certainly uninformed, because in its nature the religion they claim has no boundaries, no shibboleths, no genealogies or hereditary claimants.

However sound our credentials seem, we have it on good authority that the prostitutes and sinners might well enter heaven before us. It is difficult to respond to this assurance with a heartfelt amen if one has found comfort in despising...

Once, in a discussion of the passage in Ephesians where Paul speaks of “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” a woman in the audience, making a two-handed figure eight in the air, said, “But if you have a sword, you’re supposed to smite somebody.” Where to begin. But it is just this kind of slippage, of the figurative into the literal, of affection for the traditions of Christianity into hostility toward those who are known or assumed not to share them, that makes the religion the opposite of itself. Does the word “stranger,” the word “alien,” ever have a negative connotation in Scripture? No. Are the poor ever the object of anything less than God’s loving solicitude? No. Do the politics of those who claim a special fealty to the Bible align themselves with its teachings in these matters? No, they do not, not in contemporary America, certainly.

We have been hearing a lot about “takers” lately. True, this interpretation of the social order sent a thrill of revulsion through enough of us to doom a candidacy. But those Americans who use the word as if it actually describes something are disproportionately self-identified as Christians. Inevitably, this is how Christianity has come to be understood by a great many good people who have no better instruction in it than they receive from ranters and politicians. Under such circumstances it is only to their credit that they reject it.

Though I am not competent to judge in such matters, it would not surprise me at all to learn in any ultimate reckoning that these “nones” as they are called, for the box they check when asked their religion, are better Christians than the Christians. But they have not been given the chance even to ...

The Sabbath has a way of doing just what it was meant to do, sheltering one day in seven from the demands of economics. Its benefits cannot be commercialized. Leisure, by way of contrast, is highly commercialized. But leisure is seldom more than a bit of time ransomed from habitual stress. Sabbath is a way of life, one long since gone from this country, of course, due to secularizing trends, which are really economic pressures that have excluded rest as an option, first of all from those most in need of it.

from the time the first hominid looked up at the stars and was amazed by them, a sweet savor has been rising from this earth, every part of it—a silent music worthy of God’s pleasure. What we have expressed, compared with what we have found no way to express, is overwhelmingly the lesser part. Loyalties and tendernesses that we are scarcely aware of might seem, from a divine perspective, the most beautiful things in creation, even in their evanescence. Such things are universally human. They forbid the distinctions “us” and “them.” We do not know what we obliterate when we drop a bomb. And neither math nor science can begin to make us realize.

If we are to be competent citizens of a powerful democracy, we must encourage the study of the aptly named humanities.

I have often wondered what abyss it was that opened and swallowed so much that was good and enlightened in the social thought and the many important experiments and reforms that emerged from the abolitionist movement before the Civil War. Perhaps this gives me an answer. We simply tired of justice and equality. They were out of fashion in the new era of eugenics and social Darwinism and their ugly brother, racial science. These new enthusiasms were considered highly intellectual for just a little less than a century, not least because they were so European. They were centered in our great universities. Only relatively recent scholarship has recovered the history of these black regiments. The Civil War and the decades that preceded it called up so much courage and intelligence and sacrifice, such an outpouring of lives, and it bought us a decade or two of sanity between chattel slavery and Jim Crow. What in God’s name might we not tire of?

The humanities teach us respect for what we are—we, in the largest sense. Or they should. Because there is another reality, greater than the markets, and that is the reality in which the planet is fragile, and peace among nations, where it exists, is also fragile. The greatest tests ever made of human wisdom and decency may very well come to this generation or the next one. We must teach and learn broadly and seriously, dealing with one another with deep respect and in the best good faith.