What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  If we grant the plausibility of this view of things, then in doing so we acknowledge not only that these concepts can be, as it were, deconstructed but also that other concepts of mind and self can supplant them, new constructions that grow out of presently authoritative models of reality. For Freud the conscience, or superego, is the internalization of an oppressive father figure. For the neo-Darwinists it is a part of the system of self-deception that for whatever reason hides our inevitable selfishness from us. Models like this radically undercut the old assumption that a human mind has a faculty oriented toward truth and ready to offer testimony against the mind itself when it is erring, misguided, or corrupted, though the mind, or the subjectivity, or whatever we call it now, is assumed always to be erring, misguided, and corrupted, which makes the word truth meaningless, since our own perception and acculturation are obstacles to our determining the truth in any case—which in turn means, by these lights, that truth itself cannot be said to exist. All this can sound very sophisticated, except when it comes from the mouth of a politico who says we are beyond fact-based reality, or an undergraduate who declares a staunch preference for his own truth, also not fact-based.

  We have stepped from a metaphysics into a void. Whether the state of things we have entered was inevitable or whether we could have constructed something out of culture and history that would have borne our weight and shown us a serviceable enough true north no one can say. But here we are. Do we owe good art or good information or freedom of conscience to a humankind that cannot be assumed to have any natural affinity to the true or the good? We are gazing these days at an abysmal No.

  However the fact is to be understood, traditions of thought do pass down through time, the traditions relevant here being so-called modernism and the endlessly consequential anti-history that abolishes context and fosters incomprehension on subjects of such intrinsic interest that on this basis alone they should be acknowledged and studied. This consuming ignorance is beyond any account I can offer for it, but it does feast, black-hole fashion, on the humanist heritage preferentially, as it did when the classical tradition gave way to the Dark Ages. The ways we think do themselves deserve thought. For example, if concepts with religious history such as soul and conscience can be sufficiently redescribed in other language, this in no way diminishes their reality. If they might be redescribed and are not, then we should wonder why they are not, how their exclusion from the vocabulary of self-declared humanism is rationalized, and what the effects of the exclusion might be. If they cannot be redescribed in a nonreligious language, then we need to consider what is threatened or lost when religious language is lost. For the Puritans, conscience as a concept put the mind or soul in relation to God. It made the self an object of scrupulous contemplation. And it created a sanctity around the individual that assured important liberties.

  Our sample of existence—that is, the growing sum of whatever we can observe, test, describe, derive, or know in any meaningful sense—is too small and untypical, too contaminated with error and assumption, too prejudiced by accident and limitation to yield a metaphysics. Yet we need a metaphysics, an unconfirmable parallel reality able to support essential concepts such as mind, conscience, and soul, if we are to sustain the civilization culture and history created for us. To quote Flavel, “The soul of the poorest child is of equal dignity with the soul of Adam.” All men are created equal. Nothing about these statements is self-evident. Yet they can shape and create institutions, and they can testify against them when they fail. They have only their own beauty and the beauty of their influence to affirm them.

  Considering the Theological Virtues

  The Laing Lectures at Regent College, Vancouver, B.C.: February 8, 2017

  FAITH

  I have been asked fairly often over the years why I choose to identify myself with religion. It is an unusual choice now for a novelist who writes for a general, nonsectarian readership. But what is “usual” is not really any kind of constraint. It is the merest cobweb waiting to be brushed away, insofar as it makes itself felt at all. There are a great many fine books in the world, more every year, so if some readers are turned away from mine by my choice of subject, they are at no risk of deprivation. The answer to this question is, of course, that religion is a very central interest of mine, and I have never seen any reason to look away from a subject to which I am so strongly attracted.

  Several things are going wrong here already. The word interest does not really describe my tropism toward the vast field of experience and thought and expression I call religion, for want of a better word. Nor is subject an appropriate term for something so minutely rich and so cosmically enveloping. I have adopted myself into an old Protestant tradition, once important in England and America, now relatively unknown in the world at large and in America as well. On the one hand, it has a rich and brilliant theology and a remarkable history, and on the other hand, it is so small a part of Christendom that I can be comforted and reassured that it is indeed only a part of this vast and various world presence we call the church and the great religions. While my thinking is Christian, it has led me to a kind of universalism that precludes any notion of proselytizing. It would shake my faith in the goodness of God if I were to believe that his particular favor was reserved to members of my denomination. This is to say, I feel no conflict or contradiction between religion broadly considered and religion narrowly considered. Furthermore, I know from experience that very secular people can take a generous interest in religion and be highly sensitive to the beauty of it—that is, when its exponents are also aware of its beauty, as too often they seem not to be.

  So it is conventional among contemporary writers to exclude religion from their work, however religious the writers might in fact be. This reticence seems to be regarded by many as a courtesy, an acknowledgment of the fact that the subject can be painful or private or can stir prejudices or hostilities. Such scruples are respectable, certainly, but they tacitly reinforce the assumption that religion is essentially and inevitably divisive. So this assumption is rarely tested. It has not been my experience that the response to my books among Catholics or Jews or Muslims is in any degree less generous than that of readers whose traditions are closer to mine. The feeling of an overplus of meaning in reality, a sense that the world cannot at all be accounted for in its own terms, is a profound bond and understanding between and among religious people. It is universal in religions to grant the meaningfulness of metaphysical thought: They all query Being itself.

  Granting conflict. But there is always conflict, and to treat it as something peculiar to religion is simply uninformed. Most of us must know that religion uniquely denounces and condemns violence—to what effect we cannot know, since history is infused with religion and might well have been much darker without it. In any case, to be able to acknowledge this profound and beautiful shared assumption, that there is indeed an overplus of meaning, would be to respect something very near the hearts of people we are too ready to think of as alien in every sense. Religion could quiet our antagonisms if we let it be what it is fundamentally and at best.

  It is because of the strange state of religion, and of the conversations surrounding it, that I feel obliged to account for the fact that my preoccupations are the subject of my work. To me this seems simply appropriate. If they had narrowed my audience, no matter, I really never expected an audience. When I discovered I did have one, I took this to mean that I had their permission to write as I chose. My mind and my books have passed through life together, in conversation, so to speak. This pleases me. The resistance I have been warned to expect is not real, so far as I can tell. The warning seems to be no more than an instance of a dogged tendency to resent injury in anticipation, undeterred by the fact that the injury never comes, or that it has only the long life and broad application of anecdote, or that it is so slight as to be negligible if it is even real. People live and die stifled by fears of hostility or ridicule, the elves and ogres of contemporary consciousness
. These dreary and trivial anxieties encourage dark prejudgments of people at large. They seem to be particularly characteristic of people who call themselves Christian, though they discourage faith, hope, and love, which in this particular case would certainly drive out fear.

  I think and write about religion because I am religious. It occurred to me early in life that I wanted to align my life with things that seemed true to me. My always important brother once told me that according to Jonathan Edwards we should never allow ourselves a thought we would not entertain on our deathbeds. Stark as this standard is, and unattainable as it is, thank God, it does suggest the importance of our thinking—not primarily in light of ultimate judgment but as something appropriately disciplined by the brevity of all lives, and by acknowledgment of the extraordinary fact of one’s being a consciousness capable of shaping and orienting itself.

  The mind, that most luxuriant flowering of the highest possibilities of the material world, likes to natter and mope and trivialize itself. We let an astonishing fertility run to weeds. I realize this statement is meaningful only if it is first granted that some thoughts, our own and others, are relatively worthy of us, or unworthy on grounds of triviality, or flatly destructive. Not much in contemporary life encourages us to make this kind of distinction. Pathology invites medical or legal intervention, of course. Short of this, we are offered strategies for making ourselves more useful to the economy, for coping with stress or warding off dementia. We have no current language for the culture of the mind, which another generation might have called the care of the soul.

  There are things in reality whose limits will never be found—notably mathematics, language, and the human mind whose creatures these are. I find this fact interesting and suggestive. No doubt we will never know or find words for any meaningful fraction even of the aspects of reality that are available to our strategies of comprehension. But if this is true, it is true in fact, not in principle. High civilization, and humankind itself, may not last long enough to begin to discover what is potential in us, in our capacity for knowledge and understanding of the physical universe, including, of course, the things of this world. This potential is splendid and amazing, in itself more wonderful than anything it might discover, even if it were free from the limits our own choices set for it.

  I have found considerable resistance these days to “mind” as a concept. There is the brain, with its modalities. No more is granted. If it is objected that we are highly individuated, that we assimilate and interpret a great range of experience in ways that are distinctive, perhaps unique to us as individuals, well, the self has gone the way of the mind. It would seem that a new vocabulary should be supplied to acknowledge the experience of—so to speak—selfhood, but none is forthcoming, so far as I know. Absent the self we would be free of some familiar miseries—embarrassment, anomie, alienation, not to mention self-consciousness—and we could disregard every notion of gift or calling, which do often make us restless with our actual circumstance, bent on defining ourselves in ways that dismiss or override expectation.

  Such experiences are excluded now from learned accounts of human Being. I take this to be the case because mind and self are irreducibly complex. And this is true in part because they exist in time. They unfold, eventuate, in ways that are distinctive even when they are predictable. If we attach meaning to this existence in time, which implicates aspiration and retrospect, self-fulfillment and self-betrayal, growth and decline, then we are not captured in any moment in which, say, self-interest is enacted, or any series of such moments. We pass through time like pilgrims, always changed and somehow always the same. We have identity through time, not only in the sense that, as Wordsworth said, the child is father of the man but also because dreams recur and memories abide whether or not they are welcome. Periods of trial and of insight interact in our minds not simply as memory but as things to be pondered, whose meanings modify one another over time and whose value changes in light of further experience. I used the word mind because this kind of inwardness is not accommodated by the word brain as it is presently understood—that is, by the exclusion of our experience of it, though it does preside over and effectively constitute our experience.

  If I am granted the word mind, I think I should also be permitted the word soul. I make my claim for its meaningfulness on the following grounds: First, mind as I have described it lacks ontological mooring. If it is like other things on earth, if animals have minds, if sensibility is a quality general among living things—possibilities I am ready to concede—then our usual conception of the nature of Being is seriously defective. Second, if we extrapolate from a false notion of fundamental reality, if we say human beings must be assumed to be of a kind with everything else, and we then proceed from an impoverished view of everything else, we can only arrive at an impoverished view of human beings as well. These exclusions of concepts like mind and soul are intended as rigor and objectivity, but if they are based on fixed assumptions that are false as well as fixed, then they are only rigorous in the manner of the lesser forms of dogmatism.

  All this is to say that I am aware of the arguments brought against the kind of worldview faith proposes. I have given these arguments considerable thought and study because they are important now, as they have been since at least the eighteenth century. It seems to be in the nature of religious concepts, notably God and the soul, to trigger skepticism. People have always tested these claims of ultimate truth against their own models of reality. Nothing is proved by the fact that these two things never align, except when religion is wrenched into conformity with human understanding and effectively ceases to be religion. If this absolute reality remains aloof from our attempts at comprehension, then it is like every deep truth about the nature of things. This proves nothing, of course, but it puts faith and doubt on the same footing, a useful beginning place for a discussion like this one.

  In their various articulations these agnosticisms and atheisms have amassed prestige over time and acquired a general familiarity as well. Ground has been granted to them, uncritically, as a concession to the advance of knowledge, though often enough faith as imagined by its debunkers has little to do with faith as experience, and nothing to do with the intellectual and aesthetic traditions of religion. And the supposed “science” that has been used as leverage against it over the centuries is too flawed, even quaint, to count as knowledge. This may in fact be where the problem arises. Those who think always in objective or positivist terms imagine God as someone somewhere—an old man enthroned on a cloud, an imaginary friend. For those who think of him metaphysically and experientially he is the Creator always creating whom we know through divine attributes we can feel in ourselves—love, faithfulness, and compassion among them. I note here that these are attributes modern studies of the human mind do not attribute to us, at least not without converting them first into forms of self-interest—desacralizing them, in effect. I concluded long ago that reverence for ourselves and reverence for God are mutually dependent, inextricable. Of course nothing is ever so absolute as this sounds. I never mean to imagine limits to the grace of God. But I am struck by the consistency with which the traits that bind us together, that we value in one another, and that might therefore be assumed to promote survival are excluded from this “science” of human nature. These are, as I have said, attributes also ascribed to God.

  It is certainly striking that the project that so often claims to have emptied the heavens should at the same time, conceptually, at least, have stripped humanity of minds, moral natures, and selves—though there seems to be no necessity behind the simultaneity of effects. This suggests to me that our conception of the human self was as much theomorphic as our conception of God was anthropomorphic—that we discovered godlike gifts and qualities in ourselves even as we attributed them in a vastly higher form to the Creator.

  To characterize God as loving or patient, aggrieved or angry has been treated as a naïve projection of our hopes and fears onto an indifferent cos
mos. This view of things can be neither proved nor refuted, since belief and interpretations of experience influenced by belief on either side are quite reasonably excluded. It must be said, however, that when human nature is thought of as analogous to the nature of God, the consequences are extraordinary.

  For purposes of comparison with this traditional view we have all the modern anthropologies. Various as they are, they are entirely of one mind in avoiding the slightest suggestion that human nature has anything divine in it. In fact, it seems to be a project of theirs to minimize radically everything human in it. By human I mean, of course, everything singular about us among the species, including our bias toward error and our gift for destruction—traditionally marks of our alienation from God—as well as our reason, imagination, and creativity. We must be shorn of a great many attributes before we can begin to seem more ape than angel, even when that angel is Lucifer.

  The word soul authorizes a scale and seriousness in the conception of the human being that has no equivalent when the subject is broached in any other terms. First of all, it uniquely invests each individual person with an absolute dignity and significance. One by one we live out a passage through the world that, however opaque, is meaningful in cosmic terms. The immortality of the soul makes us all participants in an ultimate reality that transcends and in every way exceeds this transient earth. This understanding places great value in the individual and, at the same time, finds great significance in the moment-to-moment conduct of mortal life. There is clearly a reciprocal relationship between the idea of immortality, of an eternity that exists with reference to humankind, and the belief in the singular value and significance of human life. Each implies the other. And if we simply and utterly perish with the beasts, the conceptual universe contracts sharply.

  The conclusions we draw about the appropriateness of one vision or the other must be called intuitive. They are the decisions of faith. Doctrine and practice can shore up belief, even stand in the place of it, when the deeper leanings of the soul tend not to sustain it. This must mean that there is also a deeper faith behind a seeming lack or loss of faith. But the plausibility of the soul as the defining human attribute ultimately depends on our experience of ourselves and one another—and the world as well, with its power to instruct, which corresponds so tantalizingly to our prodigious ability to learn.