The Givenness Of Things

by Marilynne Robinson

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.