by JOHN COTTER
Looking like something out of a science fiction movie, the anglerfish uses a natural lure to draw its next meal nearer. PHOTO/Bruce Robison/Corbis/National Geographic
Religious education, it was becoming clear, was to be a one-way street: no question or observation of mine would make a lick of difference. I was to absorb, sponge-like, all I was told, and then behave as instructed.
So I quit the church and became a reader of novels.
Novels don’t preach. They are dialectic. A character encounters a landscape, say on the shores of a frozen lake in the rural northwest. Add a second character, say her older sister. How do the two of them interact? What if they’re stranded on an island in the center of the lake with the light fading out of the sky and no way home? Here is life — in all its terror and mystery — on the human scale, left for humans to puzzle through. It is not a sin to speculate. It is not a sin to curse.
Novels, like the church, trade in mysteries, but good novels also dispense with dogma and cant. Their characters are not gods but humans, left to make sense of the world as best they can, with no access to answers. Any character in a novel who tells you they’ve found an answer is undercut by the fact that they’re a character in a novel. The whole enterprise of writing and reading such books opens a field of indeterminacy into which the reader can float his own ideas, in which characters, author, and reader work together to find a light through the dark.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, for example tells the story of three generations of Calvinist pastors in a small Iowa town. The oldest is a social-justice revolutionary in the time of the Civil War — one of John Brown’s holy soldiers — who won’t stop at murder if that murder frees captive souls. His son is a pacifist. His grandson, the narrator, John Ames, simply tries to make sense of it all and can’t really do so.
…
I’ve loved Robinson’s novels for years, but I opened The Givenness of Things, her latest collection of essays, and found myself on the receiving end of a stern religious talking-to. The subject matter was the same as Gilead‘s: faith, its difficulty, and the buried history of liberal American Christianity. But the voice was different, louder but lesser, clotted, rushing to say nine things at once and so saying little. Needless to say this is the last thing I expected.
All of the essays here — sermons, really — share a common aim: the belittling of the biological sciences (chiefly neurology and “Neo-Darwinism,” which she seems to believe ubiquitous but does not distinguish from regular Darwinism) and the elevation of the religious life. Yes, she’s proselytizing. Marilynne Robinson, creator of vivid, nuanced landscapes and the variously motivated characters who people them has somehow managed to reduce herself to a missionary with a pamphlet.
“I am content to place humankind at the center of Creation,” she writes in “Humanism,” the essay which opens the book, nicely echoing those nuns I’d had done with in the 1980s. Humans, you see, have souls, and animals don’t. It’s as simple as that. She attempts to critique the pretensions of neuroscientists and the neo-Darwinists via the mind-bending discoveries of 20th-century physics, but this is like critiquing chalk with the language of cheese. She wields reason and science like axes until the moment they stop serving her argument; then she drops them as if they seethed with infernal fire.
Because neuroscientists and neo-Darwinists can find no room for the soul (as John Calvin defined it), she can find no room for them:
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. Obviously this intuition — it is much richer and deeper than anything conveyed by the word “belief” — cannot be dispelled by proving the soul’s physicality, from which it is aloof by definition.
In the very sentence that preceded the above, she derided neuroscience for being “remarkable among sciences for its tendency to bypass hypothesis and even theory and go directly to assertion,” as though for all the world she herself wasn’t about to do just that, or to write, three pages later, again about Calvin’s conception of the soul, “This is no proof. Be that as it may.”
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