Mondays with Marilynne: One Kind of Vision

Last month in Mondays with Marilynne, we discussed novelist Marilynne Robinson's critical success, her cultural impact, and some of the ways her faith shapes her perspectives on the public life of our nation. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Robinson's political vision is the most important aspect of her work. After all, there are other figures in contemporary Christianity saying, substantively, the same things as Robinson about social and economic issues, but there are few who are able to capture in such moving prose the beauty of a spiritual life.

Robinson's spirituality, like her politics, centers on the theology concept of imago Dei, the image of God. The centrality of this concept is evident from the first pages of her best known work, Gilead, in which the narrator John Ames, an aging Congregational minister, confesses:

“I can’t really tell what’s beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent. “When they saw me coming, of course the joking stopped, but I could see they were still laughing to themselves, thinking what the old preacher almost heard them say" (5).

Here we see Ames' characteristically Protestant way of being grandiose and understated at once. What Ames hears in the laughter or crying of the people around him is the laughter or crying of God's very Self. Although he'll occasionally launch into reflections on Calvin or Feuerbach, Ames is, on the whole, far more of pastor than a theologian, far more present to the people and things surrounding him than to anything he may have studied in seminary.

Ames, like Robinson herself, is alive to the mystery of divinity in humanity, a mystery which must be carefully taught and zealously guarded lest it go unnoticed: "You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but love and loyalty and mutual incomprehension" (7). For Ames, this knowing in unknowing comes most clearly in the moments a human life begins or ends, moments he has been observing for a lifetime in his vocation as minister. He perceives this existential awareness as a gift of divine grace he received most clearly at the birth of his daughter, who died in infancy decades before the start of the novel:

 "Memory can make a thing seem to have been more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I’m glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face … It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any" (66).

The full beauty of Robinson's spirituality here is that, even if few of us will ever be able to write like Robinson, the experience to which she points is accessible to all of us--to anyone willing to pay attention to his or her neighbors, friends, family, anybody we meet. Here, admittedly, Robinson might owe as much to Whitman as to Whitefield, but the point remains. The simple attentiveness commended in these passages from Gilead gives rise to Christian love, and "Love is holy," Ames points out in perfectly Calvinistic fashion, "because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters." Rather, it is always something else. When we think of someone we love, we may be able to offer a list of characteristics in that person which we admire, but none of them constitute the reason we love the person. If we tried to name that mystery, I suspect the only language we'd have is the sort of religious vocabulary Robinson reclaims from the spewers of cliches: words like grace, love, incarnation--and yes, the image of God.

Mondays with Marilynne: "Let the Poore be Mainteined"

President Obama presented Marilynne Robinson with the National Humanities Medal in 2013.

“Well, what is a Christian, after all? Can we say that most of us are defined by the belief that Jesus Christ made the most gracious gift of his life and death for our redemption? Then what does he deserve from us? He said we are to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Granted, these are difficult teachings. But does our most gracious Lord deserve to have his name associated with concealed weapons and stand-your-ground laws, things that fly in the face of his teaching and example? Does he say anywhere that we exist primarily to drive an economy and flourish in it? He says precisely the opposite. Surely we all know this. I suspect that the association of Christianity with positions that would not survive a glance at the Gospels or the Epistles is opportunistic, and that if the actual Christians raised these questions those whose real commitments are to money and hostility and potential violence would drop the pretense and walk away.” --Marilynne Robinson, qtd. by Robert Long, The American Conservative, 10/15/2013

Last week on Groupthink, we introduced a new series, “Mondays with Marilynne.” In the series introduction, we took a quick look at Robinson’s faith, literature values, and cultural impact. I referred a few times, in fact, to Robinson’s most famous fan, the President of the United States. 

When President Obama presented the National Humanities Medal in 2013, he addressed the recipients: “Your writings have changed me--I think for the better.” Then, turning directly to Robinson, he said, “I believe that Marilynne.” Since then, Obama has quoted Robinson in his weekly addresses and, most movingly, in his eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney (an important and deeply Christian sermon in itself).

While Robinson’s novels are not political manifestos, and people of all political persuasions have found great beauty and meaning in her words, it is worth spending some time this week looking over her political convictions and their relationship to her Christian faith.

Marilynne Robinson is nothing if not politically vocal. While she is well known in the world of American literature, fewer people know that, as political philosopher Peter Lawler so rightly notes, “Robinson is quite the theologian, historian and essayist, and she has devoted herself to recovering--pretty much on her own and against every grain--our authentic Puritan/Calvinist tradition [in American civic discourse].”* 

Robinson’s unique political vision is rooted in a sophisticated reading of the Bible, Calvinist theology, and the Protestant heritage of the United States. She does not hesitate to draw from the Christian gospel implications for policy on social services, income disparity, racial justice, gun control, and military spending, to name a few of the issues she has weighed in on over the years.

Robert Long of The American Conservative (whose coverage of Robinson’s work I highly recommend in spite of any ideological disagreements we might have), traces the roots of Robinson’s social thought to Calvin’s statement in The Institutes of the Christian Religion that “the image of God by which [your neighbor] is recommended to you deserves your surrender of yourself and all you possess.” In fact, she even traces the origins of liberal democracy to what many today consider an unlikely source: the Pentateuch.

“Only the tradition of Moses integrated civil law into the religious mythos, the sacred narrative,” she writes in her essay “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism”. “For this reason it has the singular inflection of an attentive, passionate--and singular--divine voice. In what other body of law could compliance be urged with the phrase ‘for you know the heart of the stranger’?” (When I Was a Child I Read Books, 71).

Robinson is no biblical literalist. She shows a perfectly rational awareness of the many shortcomings of our forebears in faith. She does not “think we should stone witches.” But, in Robinson’s own words again, “if you choose to value one or two verses in Leviticus over the enormous, passionate calls for social justice that you find right through the Old Testament, that’s primitive.” 

(Here, Robinson addresses the true motives of those on the far right who believe they can safely ignore the biblical imperative to care for the orphan and widow while tossing about a few favorite verses in argument against abortion or gay marriage, but her words should be equally stinging to that portion of the progressive community that dismisses out of hand the possibility that religion could have anything to contribute to the common good.)

For Robinson, the centrality of law in Israel’s traditions and the development of a “rule of law” in Western culture are both results of a “high valuation of life in the world and in community,” a valuation we may acquire from a faithful reading of our religious traditions. Such a valuation will lead most naturally to a policy of liberalism in the oldest sense of the word--open-handedness, the willingness to “Give to everyone who begs from you, and … not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you” (Matthew 5:42).

Since she enjoys an enormous audience, which includes a fair number of conservative Christians, Robinson often receives criticism for her political statements. For instance, one of my colleagues who attended Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing a few years ago tells me she had to field a question from an audience member who said her speech "could have been ghost-written by Bill Moyers and aired on PBS," a fact which apparently destroyed her credibility with much of the assembled audience.

Robinson reportedly answered, "I don't recognize any other obligation than to say what it is true."

*Peter Lawler, "Tocqueville and Robinson in Defense of the Puritans' Sunday," Society 45.2 (September 2009), 445.

Mondays with Marilynne: The Capacity for Imaginative Love

“I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community. I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of--who knows it better than I?--people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.” --Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” When I Was a Child I Read Books, 21.

When most of us think of fiction, we probably don’t think of God. Religious faith is a harrowing topic for the contemporary novelist precisely because we find so much God-language coopted by lazy or unscrupulous writers looking for a fast track to somber tone or a niche audience with a big hankering for kitsch. This contemporary reticence to speak of matters of the soul once led The New Yorker’s James Wood to describe Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead as “one of the most unconventional conventionally popular novels of recent times.” (Last October, she also gained the distinction of becoming the only author who ever kept this blogger up literally all night with a new book release.)

Robinson, a devoted member and former lay preacher of the United Church of Christ, has never been shy about her Christian faith. “It’s too exhausting and demanding to write,” she told RNS’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “I would never write about anything I didn’t really want to write about…. Faith is one of the great structuring elements in civilization. It has fascinated the best minds of many centuries. If it happens to fascinate yours also, there is no reason to be afraid. Of what? A bad review?”

Robinson’s work certainly hasn’t garnered many of those. In 2005, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her second novel, Gilead. In 2012, she received the National Humanities Medal, and just last week, President Barack Obama used her words in his eulogy for the for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

For Robinson, the theological concept of the imago Dei is at the absolute center of both literary production and the civic life. “I believe very strongly that this world,” she once said in an interview with The American Conservative, “these billions of companions on earth that we know are God’s images, are to be loved, not only in their sins, but especially in all that is wonderful about them.” Reading her work has convinced me that the power of language is quite truthfully a sacramental power, making the presence of Christ, the Word made flesh, evident even in absence. I am not sure I believe all the claims bandied about that literary fiction makes us more empathetic (some of the very nastiest people I have ever met have held graduate degrees in literature), but I do believe, like President Obama, that Robinson’s writing has changed me for the better.

Over the next few months, this Groupthink series will introduce (or reintroduce) readers to her life and thought, her theological impact and influences, her social convictions, and her brilliant contribution to the life of the church. I hope, in the weeks to come, that I can pique each reader’s curiosity enough to pick up every one of Robinson’s books for herself. Along the way, we will engage critically with the work of theologians from John Calvin to James Cone to Fanny Howe. Ultimately, I hope every one of you will come to share my conviction that, in the words of John Ames, the narrator of Gilead, “It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I can find words for.”