The Givenness Of Things

by Marilynne Robinson

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.

that we cannot see or take or eat becomes one substance with us. The whole force of the sacrament, says Calvin, lies in the Word: ‘given for you,’ ‘shed for you.’ Those who take in the language of the sign truly take the thing signified.” A poem attributed to the young Queen Elizabeth expresses the same understanding: Hoc est corpus meum ’Twas Christ the Word that spake it. The same took bread and brake it, And as the Word did make it, So I believe and take it.

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.

Medical science does not know what life is, but it is very careful to distinguish it from death just the same, and very little inclined to question the reality of the phenomenon on the grounds that it lacks a satisfactory account of it. Neuroscience does not know what the mind or the self is, and has made a project of talking them out of existence for the sake of its theories which exclude them. They have banished the dichotomy called Cartesian by excluding one major term, the mind, that is.

The whole traffic of interaction among human beings, and between the human and the divine, is essentially a matter of inward experience – often it is dread, loneliness, homesickness, and regret, interpreted as alienation from God, or as the fear of alienation.

Why do we talk too much when we are nervous? Drugs and therapies are marketed to the voice in our heads that is so alert to our failings, and so frustrated by them. 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.

Say the universe has no boundary and the stars are numberless. Still there is an infinite qualitative difference between life and the most opulent and glorious reaches of lifelessness.

Thought, that gorgeous blossoming of consciousness so deeply interesting to earlier civilization, dropped away as an object of thought as a consequence of the strange idea that we are not appropriately described by the qualities that are unique to us. This idea has eluded scrutiny, having created an environment friendly to its own flourishing.

But since myth – never to be confused with fable – is ontology, since its terms attempt to describe the origins and nature of reality, Christianity was induced to excuse itself from explorations of this kind, to tend to its own truncated magisterium, or, to put the matter another way, to stumble forever at its own threshold, fretting over the issue of belief versus disbelief, having accepted garden variety credibility or plausibility as the appropriate standard to bring to bear on these reported intrusions of higher truth upon human experience.

Yet wisdom can only mean insight, and so long as the dead level reality that is all contemporary thought admits to is the whole field upon which insight can be brought to bear, nothing nontrivial can result from it.

We are grass, no doubt of it. But with a sense of history we can have a perspective that lifts us out of our very brief moment here. Certainly this is one purpose of biblical narrative and poetry.

I watch constantly for any least fragment of a Gospel that could, however obliquely, however remotely, cast all this in any but a satanically negative light. I am moving, reluctantly, toward the conclusion that these Christians, if they read their Bibles, are not much impressed by what they find here.

In any case, how is it possible, given this economics of dark grievance that has so benefited arms manufacturers, cable celebrities, gold mongers, and manufacturers of postapocalyptic grocery items, that they can not only claim Christianity but can also substantially empty the word of other meanings and associations? I’m a Christian, insofar as I can be. As a matter of demographics, of heritage, of acculturation, of affinity, identification, loyalty. I aspire, with uneven results, to satisfying its moral and spiritual standards, as I understand them. I have other loyalties that are important to me, to secularism, for example. To political democracy. These loyalties are either implied by my Christianity or are highly compatible with it. I am a Christian. There are

Then again, I probably startled some here when I said, matter-of-factly, I’m a Christian. Even though I have been writing theologically influenced essays and novels for many years, I find that I startle people when I make this simple statement of fact. This is a gauge of the degree to which the right have colonized the word and also of the degree to which the center and left have capitulated, have surrendered the word and also the identity.

But the analogy breaks down under the sheer weight of the good that has been done, and has since been ridiculed and abandoned, by generosity as a social and moral ethic, by openhandedness as a strategy of wealth creation, material as well as social and cultural. By liberalism.

Incarceration for profit. I would never have thought we could sink so low.

the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection are all highly charged statements about the nature of Being and human being. They are profound, and, so far as I know, unique assertions of the transcendent value of human life, asserting most forcefully the value of the lives of the powerless and the obscure.

Since American intellectual culture is an endless corridor of funhouse mirrors, we don’t know what Karl Marx did know, that the cotton economy of the South was altogether the creature of British industrial capitalism. It was the greatest producer of wealth in the American economy, and its apologists foresaw a limitless expansion of it, into the North, and even into Central and South America. It was a great engine of wealth dependent on what Davis called, rather coolly, “this species of property,” African slaves. One need not read far to see what our great experiment might have become. And the spirit behind it would have been Mammon, not Moses.

But if Christianity is instead a metaphysics that resolves all reality at every moment into holiness, whether honored or offended against, then its demands are of a higher order entirely. This second, utterly sacred cosmos is the splendid old home of liberal Christian thought. And we were the ones who once elevated the Hebrew Bible to a prominence unique in Christian history.

It seems we have wearied of the demands our traditions made of us, perhaps of its emphasis on learning, perhaps of its mystery and beauty. At any rate, many of us, many in our pulpits and seminaries, have turned away from it.

Jesus establishes the ethos that is to prevail among his followers in these terms: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted,” a verse that can be read to mean that the estimation in which one is held within the Christian community is the inverse of one’s claims or pretensions, and to mean at the same time that the divine tendency to cast down the proud and exalt the humble will be active in their case.

What is man? And the son of man? When the questions are rephrased inclusively – What is humankind? What is a human being, a mortal? – their power dissipates a little. The singularity of the human person in the uniqueness of his or her experience of being, and experience of God, is lost when we are thought of collectively, as the unspecific member of a species, or as defined by the fact that death will overtake us. “Man” is a stark, brave word, unaccommodated, solitary. Our recent struggles with gender have had strange effects on our use of language and unexamined consequences for our intellectual imagination. The word “soul” is feminine in Latin, and this seems not to have troubled anyone through all the centuries in which theologies were written in that language, even though in poetry and painting the soul is often represented as having the form of a woman.

Prologue to the Gospel of John, this reconception of the Creation narrative that places Christ at the center of the phenomenon of Creation even while it declares his earthly presence in Jesus of Nazareth. To me this implies that a quality which can be called human inheres in Creation, a quality in which we participate, which is manifested in us, which we epitomize. It implies that Jesus is the defining instance of this essential humanity. Christ is central ontologically, and what I have called humanity is ontological as well, profoundly intrinsic to Being because he was in the beginning with God and without him nothing was made that was made.

education. Religions are expressions of the sound human intuition that there is something beyond being as we experience it in this life. What is often described as a sense of the transcendent might in some cases be the intuition of the actual.

unfathomable has a most legitimate place in any conceptualization of an ultimate reality. Paradoxically, I suppose, it is only our limited understanding that keeps the unfathomable from being more unfathomable still.

causality. These anomalies, selfhood among them, he took as proofs of the active, present, unfolding will of God.

what is I? It is a seemingly complete and knowable self always vulnerable to startling intrusions and disruptions that can only have their origins in that same self – impulse, inspiration, sudden access of memory. The sense of self is as necessary to us as our physical bodies. But it is incommensurate with the nature and potentialities of the mind with which it would seem to be synonymous.

that I believe in a divine Creation, and in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and the life to come. I take the Christian mythos to be a special revelation of a general truth, that truth being the ontological centrality of humankind in the created order, with its theological corollary, the profound and unique sacredness of human beings as such. The arbitrariness of our circumstance frees me to say that the Arbiter of our being might well act toward us freely, break in on us, present us with radical Truth in forms and figures we can radically comprehend.

I’m often surprised by the literalism of rationalist and even scientific belief in the physical as a unique category, and as one whose norms and predictabilities, however localized, have an authority out of all proportion to their place even in the cosmos we know.

forces. I take the Jamesian view, that what we know about anything is determined by the way we encounter it, and therefore we should never assume that our knowledge of anything is more than partial.

respect, I would suggest that our great illusion is in fact stasis, solidity. Time flows one way, gravity is much weaker than it ought to be – existence as we know it depends entirely on these anomalies. And why does the reality that contains us cohere as it does, given that it is and can only be of one substance with that primal storm I mentioned earlier? What strange nexus is this that has let us feel becalmed? We look out at the collisions of galaxies and are amazed. We should be more amazed that our cities stand, our bodies pass through maturity and aging, our selves are rooted in and derive from a past that cannot be evaded and is nowhere to be found.

physical, if we give the word “physical” its proper meaning. As the word is used casually, ordinarily, inexactly, it means only what is accessible to our senses. But our senses select arbitrarily. Is space a void or a substance? This is debated. If antimatter should cross the little margin of relative scarcity that allows matter to exist, Being would be gone in the blink of an eye, solid Mars extinct as the dream I might have had the next night. But who has any conception of antimatter? These are conditions for the existence of everything we call physical, and we don’t know what they are. Like the word “human,” the word “physical” carries an implicit modifier that conditions its meaning – “merely” human, “merely” physical. It is absolutely medieval, downright pre-Copernican, to isolate the world we know from the heavens as we know them to be. Creation can only be altogether one phenomenon, ourselves included. Taken down to its essence, it is energy, whatever that is.

experienced my earthly life more deeply. It is my fault that I didn’t. I could have been a better scholar of Walt Whitman.

We are archcapitalists, so we tell ourselves and everyone else at every opportunity. We publish hundreds of thousands of books each year. Being archcapitalists, we must proceed always and only in search of profit.

It is odd to treat the country, by which I and commentators in general mean its population, as grasping capitalists on the basis of the fact that 1 percent or fewer control 40 percent of the national wealth. Which is to say that 99 percent, or more, control, per capita, a very small share of it. Why do the 1 percent, rather than the 99 percent, seem to critics and moralists to characterize the culture? Most people don’t participate in the economy of manipulation and financial gimmickry that seems to have produced our dubious elite.

The 99 percent were swept into the capitalist schema by the phrase “class envy” – these people had what all the rest of us wanted, supposedly. Most of us want a reasonable degree of control over the life of the country – that old democratic expectation that the lives of most of us should not be vulnerable to the whims of a self-interested elite. The ethic, for want of a better word, by which this elite has flourished is ethically repulsive by the lights of the population in general.

We insist on the word “capitalist,” a word Marx did not apply to us,

urging it on ourselves as our defining quality and at the same time deploring it, more on the left, less on the right. It is characteristic of certain terms – capitalist, materialist, consumerist – that their speaker is exempting himself, at least in the sense that any vacancy he feels in his life, any shallowness she feels in her motives, are induced by cultural influences, economic determinism first of all. In this capitalist environment, we can only marvel that we are not quite as grasping as everyone else. Well, not the people we know, really, but those hordes out beyond somewhere who collectively exude this toxic atmosphere. Those nameless wage-fallen others who somehow make Wall Street Wall Street and are overweight besides. Truly, I am sick to death of presumptive contempt of the only human souls most of us will ever have any meaningful relationship with, who offer the only experience of life in the world that most of us will ever have occasion to ponder seriously, that is, respectfully and compassionately, that is, with grace. It is very easy for me to imagine that my life might have gone another way, and that I might be one among those great multitudes about whose inward life nothing is known, upon whom social pathologies can be projected. It really is rather miraculous that someone as ill-suited to the demands of life as I am should have found a niche to flourish in. I have lived long enough to chalk up to age inadequacies that have been with me the whole of my c...