The Givenness of Things: Essays

by Marilynne Robinson

Now we are less interested in equipping and refining thought, more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being—for those who create and master them, at least. Now we are less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, more engrossed in the drama of staying ahead of whatever it is we think is pursuing us. Or perhaps we are just bent on evading the specter entropy. In any case, 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.

The real assertion being made in all this (neuroscience is remarkable among sciences for its tendency to bypass hypothesis and even theory and to go directly to assertion) is that there is no soul. Only the soul is ever claimed to be nonphysical, therefore immortal, therefore sacred and sanctifying as an aspect of human being. It is the self but stands apart from the self. It suffers injuries of a moral kind, when the self it is and is not lies or steals or murders, but it is untouched by the accidents that maim the self or kill it.

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.

am a theist, so my habits of mind have a particular character. Such predispositions, long typical in Western civilization, have been carefully winnowed out of scientific thought over the last two centuries in favor of materialism, by which I mean a discipline of exclusive attention to the reality that can be tested by scientists. This project was necessary and very fruitful. The greatest proof of its legitimacy is that it has found its way to its own limits. Now scientific inference has moved past the old assumptions about materiality and beyond the testable.

If I seem to have strayed from my subject, it is only to make the point that forgetting the character of the Reformation, that is, the passion for disseminating as broadly as possible the best of civilization as the humanist tradition understood it, and at the same time honoring and embracing the beauty of the shared culture of everyday life, has allowed us to come near to forgetting why we developed excellent public libraries, schools, and museums.

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 transformed by, the atmospheres of a given mind. We may talk about the elegance of an equation, but we forget to find value in the beauty of a thought.

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.

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

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. The very generosity and idealism of young people is turning them away. I know this is not unique to America. 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. And it will be an appalling deprivation on every side of the great body of art and thought and ethical profundity that has been so incalculable an enrichment of all our lives. Can a culture be said to survive when it has rejected its heritage? 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.

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.

dwindle. A recent article in The New York Times reported that the mainline traditions were actually gaining ground, relative to the so-called fundamentalists. The article concluded by quoting a professor in a mainline seminary to the effect that they spent a great deal of their time trying to adapt the methods of the fundamentalists to their own purposes. This I do truly believe. I would expect this to be the case for the next few decades, so that they and fundamentalism can lose the interest of the populace together.

To consider the phenomenon in a relatively innocuous form: I have been involved in one way or another in higher education for most of my adult life. I have seen any number of scholarly fads come and go. A new approach can refresh a field of study, and when this happens it is an excellent thing. A new approach can have the relationship to its field of study that a very small lifeboat has to a large and sinking ship. Ill-advised crowding, unwholesome proximity, uncivil exclusion. And who knows for sure that the ship was really sinking after all. As a professor of literature, more or less, I have seen scholarly criticism given over to quasi-sociology, or -psychology, or -economic theory, or -anthropology, taking some sort of authority from the imposition of jargon that is either dubious in itself, wholly inappropriate to its subject, or both. This looks to me like the abandonment of literature as such, its reduction to data to be fed into theories. It is only logical in the circumstances that the individual student’s encounter with a book should be marginalized in favor of a more knowing construction of its meaning. Nothing is lost except everything that makes literature the preeminent art. The music of it would clog the conceptual machinery. I have had students at the Workshop tell me that until they came there they had never heard the word “beautiful” applied to a literary text. Beside the great interest this phenomenon has always had in itself, beauty is a strategy of emph...

If we are to be competent citizens of a powerful democracy, we must encourage the study of the aptly named humanities. The cultures of the world’s people are complex and diverse, but they are manifestations of one phenomenon, the uniqueness of the human presence on earth. A student of the French Enlightenment knows at least something about the profound particularities of history and circumstance that invest any place and period. A student of Greek or German begins to understand that languages both constrain and enable the thought of those who speak them. Touch a limit of your understanding and it falls away, to reveal mystery upon mystery. The one great lesson we can take from the study of any civilization is the appropriateness of reverence, of awe, and of pity, too. This would be a good thing for the citizens of a powerful democracy to remember.

began to learn that in the overwhelming percentage of cases, these Marxists had not read Marx. I assume some must have, but I never found a single one. The confession did not embarrass them. Of course anyone can call himself a Marxist, on the same grounds that I can call myself a Plantagenet if I want to. Absent the intent to defraud, which is possibly an issue in the case of those who pose as experts in and converts to a highly readable and available body of thought with which they have in fact no familiarity whatever. They were a voluble lot and seemed to be mutually intelligible in a through-the-looking-glass language that yielded, for example, preposterous misstatements about such things as Marx’s view of the American Civil War—about which Marx wrote extensively. No doubt some part of their once great influence lingers. I was recently at a meeting of international scholars who were as one in resenting, rather in the manner of a classe dangereuse, their economic enslavement. So Marx is still unread. Perhaps the Marxist influence lingers in the principled neglect of primary texts and the principled reliance on esoteric language, which certainly contribute to the growing sense that higher education in general and the humanities in particular have nothing to do with anything.

America is a Christian country. This is true in a number of senses. Most people, if asked, will identify themselves as Christian, which may mean only that they aren’t something else. Non-Christians will say America is Christian, meaning that they feel somewhat apart from the majority culture. There are any number of demographic Christians in North America because of our history of immigration from countries that are or were also Christian. We are identified in the world at large with this religion because some of us espouse it not only publicly but also vociferously. As a consequence, we carry a considerable responsibility for its good name in the world, though we seem not much inclined to consider the implications of this fact. If we did, some of us might think a little longer about associating the precious Lord with ignorance, intolerance, and belligerent nationalism.

There is something I have felt the need to say, that I have spoken about in various settings, extemporaneously, because my thoughts on the subject have not been entirely formed, and because it is painful to me to have to express them. However, my thesis is always the same, and it is very simply stated, though it has two parts. First, contemporary America is full of fear. And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind.

My favorite theologian at the moment is an Englishman named John Locke.