The Givenness of Things: Essays

by Marilynne Robinson

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.