The Givenness of Things: Essays

by Marilynne Robinson

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...