What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  As I have said, this sort of thinking is ordinarily dismissed as anthropomorphic, the projection of human traits onto an empty heaven. Of course there is also the important projection of human preferences onto an ancient text. It is instructive to note how very far these differ from the God of light and hope, exactly as if that very human question “Who is my neighbor?” were never answered. Still, if we imagine an injured man lying by the road, we will imagine also the hope that would arise in him when he heard voices or footsteps, and the sinking away of hope as they approached, then passed.

  Life is largely an instruction in emotions of this kind, generally slight and transient enough to inoculate us a little against the greater shocks that will surely come. Perhaps if all the hope in the world, large and small, were made visible, creation would appear as tense as a strung bow. We may all live in anticipation more than in present time, worry and dread pulling us out of the moment, too, but hope giving us better purpose, the imagination of what might fall into place, to our benefit or satisfaction. Hope shapes intention. It leaves improbable possibilities open, which means that it influences the unfolding of future time. No one knows what time is, of course, but insofar as it is a stream of events influenced by earlier events—giving this word its broadest meaning—then, say, leaving the light on and supper in the oven might mean that anger would not end in alienation and all its consequences. In this instance the future would be different from what it might have been. Say a thousand small accommodations of hope were made in any city in any one day, as no doubt they would be, and many more besides. Then the sun would rise again on an ordinary day, different in a thousand unremarked particulars from the ordinary day it would have risen on otherwise. There would be hope vindicated and rewarded, hope waiting or lingering, hope thwarted. Each of these would have its consequences, threaded imperceptibly through ordinary time, changing time as I have defined it here. This is to say that whatever the future is, we have a certain purchase on it, far less by intention than in the unselfconscious expression of our nature. Hope is our capacity to predispose events to take a certain turn, by preparing for it or by recognizing tendencies favorable to it. This sounds like a cheering commonplace. But if futurity, time that is not yet present but will be, is an aspect of cosmic reality, like the decay products that will displace radioactive isotopes, then our acting on the future intentionally or not puts us in an effective relationship with an aspect of cosmic reality. So how alien from it can we actually be?

  I absolutely do not wish to suggest some power of positive thinking. Hope is profoundly vulnerable to disappointment, as I have said. I am simply considering how a human capacity interacts with the given world. Most of what we do, we do with reference to an hour from now or a year from now. No matter whether we do what we intend to do well or badly, whether or not we are actually preparing what we intend, we are giving future time its character, its burden. One of my old Puritans proposed that we might be judged twice, once at our death and once when the full effects of our lives had played themselves out, specifically when every crude or false or slanderous thing we have said is gone from every living mind. This is another way of making the same point. Slurs on vulnerable people affect the future of whole societies, as surely as they did their past. On this little ball of earth, where action and inaction, speech and silence all have consequences, we are, I would say, a special instance of cosmic time. We inhabit it differently from creatures who are without our strange efficacy. We exist in it differently from the wheeling constellations. In a remarkable degree, for the purposes of this planet, we create it. Religion is an intuition that in this respect the cosmos, for our purposes, is neither indifferent nor inhuman. This means what we really ought to know by now, that our moral choices, the resort to violence, exploitation of the vulnerable, our allowing populations to experience loss, despair, and bitterness, such things impact reality profoundly and irreversibly. Time for human purposes might more closely resemble a mind, a vast memory, or a troubled, self-protective conscience than “the ticking of eternity,” to quote Edna St. Vincent Millay. The modern theories of the self take no account of history. Their dehumanization of Being is total. So our impact, our history, cannot be acknowledged, though it could bring virtually every form of life to an end.

  Again, while it is no doubt true that if we encouraged better hopes in ourselves the whole thing would last longer, this is not the point I wish to make. My point is that the ancient intuition that creation has some profound business with us, that we are by no means aliens in this world however eccentric our presence in it, in fact because we are an eccentric presence in it, is sound. If this is granted, many things follow, one of them being the presumption of the validity of categories of human experience, for example, beauty, meaning, good, and evil. Another being the essential, irreducible interest and value of the human person and of human life. There is no baseline reality over against which human reality can be called less real, however radically unlike they are, and because they are radically unlike. Our errors and illusions can have all the potency of floods and famines. Truth can never really be said to come naturally to us, yet we as a species seem to be alone with the concept of truth. This little Eden, earth, is an exception to the universe, still and temperate amid unimaginable extremes of heat and cold and barrenness, where great rivers of matter pour through spaces so vast that their inconceivable velocity seems to change nothing. And we, on earth, are again exceptional, a simple fact that should not be omitted from any account of us simply because it makes us indescribable in the terms we propose, rightly or wrongly, for the understanding of other creatures.

  I propose that a radical anthropocentricity amounts to nothing more than facing facts. I know some people take this as grounds for callous assertions of our dominance over the biosphere—in defiance of that very human thing common sense, not to mention human moral standards, which we are clearly free to ignore but which generally restrain most of us. This is an absurd leap, which lands anthropocentricity in the same place as the notion that we are beasts among the beasts, loyal only to our genes. That so many of us are strongly inclined to gain the whole world while losing our own souls is a bias of our nature, which can rationalize itself without the help of any particular theory.

  I have not forgotten my tiny old lady and her enduring love, which is the basis and substance of her hope. Let us say that in the sphere of Being that allows us life, where, remarkably, what we do matters, it is also true that we matter, that our little world of evening and morning is as providential as it has seemed to other generations on far slighter grounds than our science has provided to us. Providential means both “free” and “arbitrary.” Let there be and there was. Paul says love will not pass away. John says God is love. At best, hope is an intuition that this could be true, with the kind of essential truth affirmed in eternity, in the Being of God, who is in infinite ways more anomalous even than we are, more improbable even than we are, judged in the terms of a reductionism that is infinitely less useful in his case than in ours. Say that in our difference from everything else we and God are like each other—creative, knowing, efficacious, deeply capable of loyalty. Say that in his healing and feeding and teaching, Jesus let us see that the good that matters to mortal us matters also to eternal God. Then we have every reason to hope.

  LOVE

  God is love. These words, which appear twice in the First Epistle of John, are dauntingly vast in their implications. Clearly the writer intended that they should be. His letter begins with a theological or metaphysical statement very like the opening passage of the Gospel according to John, but even by that standard, luminous with a singular witness. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, have looked upon and touched with our hands—.” This John, perhaps the disciple in his old age, writes with astonishment that Jesus was seen and touched, that these most ordinary things were true of him. If his words recall the accounts other disciples made of their encounters with Je
sus after his resurrection, this would only make the point that the Jesus who lived was the Jesus who was resurrected—“the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—.”

  On the basis of his friendship with Jesus, John makes an absolute statement about the nature of God. At the same time, he very powerfully evokes the fleshly humanity of Jesus, in whom, through whom, this statement is justified. Some scholars say John was writing to counter Docetism, an early heresy that understood Jesus as purely spiritual. There is a tendency among scholars to interpret a text by placing another narrative beside it that makes its language and content evidence of a rhetorical or polemical strategy. So John is writing to reinforce a tenet of the new faith. This is clearly true. Still, the implications of this kind of scholarly interpretation are more important than they appear. John might well be responding to an early misunderstanding of a claim that is never readily grasped, perhaps never really grasped at all, though familiarity can dull anyone’s sense of the strangeness of it. Then again, he might be expressing his own abiding wonder at his friend’s presence through all those silent years before his life became remarkable enough to leave an account or a record, the years when Jesus, his voice as yet unheard in the street, lived the humble life that brought him to his epochal death.

  A theory set beside a biblical text or any text might be true enough in its own way and yet distract from the actual significance of the thing it is meant to explain. Imagine a caller to 911 saying, “Help! Help! My house is on fire and my dog and my Picasso are both inside!” The responder could say, with accuracy, that the caller had employed familiar rhetorical strategies, including repetition and volume, to convey an anxiety about the potential loss of items of material and emotional value characteristic of calls of this genre (engaging in hyperbole, perhaps, since it is unlikely that he owns a Picasso) as well as his desire for urgent attention to this problem, also typical. But this would involve a substantial loss of meaning. To read John’s testimony as essentially controversial, an insistence on a point of doctrine, a shoring up of orthodoxy, rather than as a record of his own amazed remembrance, is among other things a retrojection of later concerns of the church onto its earliest, formative generation, as if it would already be alert to threats to itself as an institution. That fault lines began to emerge early is not surprising, considering the rapid spread of the faith into distant cultures where its original basis in Judaism would not have had the strong influence it had in Judea. (I know Judaism in the modern sense did not exist before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. But it seems as good a term as any for the religious culture that would become Judaism.) That these departures from Johannine, Pauline, and Petrine teaching took form as competing doctrines might be expected as well. This does not mean that John is addressing them here. The striking thing about John’s letter is not simply the assertion that he and others who had known Jesus could attest to the fact that he was indeed a human being. It is that someone John had known as a brother and teacher was also a profound, direct revelation of God, and this enabled John to speak of God with utter confidence and authority, and joy as well. It is not the divine attributes of Jesus—his teaching, his healing, his miracles, even his resurrection—that must be insisted upon and that are remembered as things to be wondered at. It is that Jesus could be seen and touched. Very God had been embodied in a human being, a human life, one so fully human that he could and did pass in the street unremarked.

  Clearly the Jewish world of the time was full of pious young men. By pious I mean good. It is a peculiarity of our time that I am obliged to make this clear. Jesus, in the tradition of the prophets, attacked self-righteousness and hypocrisy. This should not obscure the fact that even imperfect or occasional or, for that matter, merely habitual obedience to the Law of Moses that required love of the neighbor, love of the stranger, justice and generosity to the poor, days of rest, and so on would sustain a culture vastly gentler than most, ancient or modern. Then there is the fact that Judaism was under pressure from military occupation by the world’s greatest power and from the influence and prestige of Hellenism, so that the best way for them to protect the life of their faith was to live their faith. While this is always true, their circumstances would have strongly encouraged the choice. To do this would have required learning and reflection of the kind Paul boasts of having experienced as a young Pharisee. Paul is himself evidence of sometimes inappropriate zeal, of course, no doubt driven by exactly these pressures.

  At the synagogue in Nazareth Jesus is given the book of the prophet Isaiah to read from, the greatest of all prophets of justice and liberation. So we know that his fellow Jews maintained their faith in a God who cared for the afflicted and the brokenhearted. Jesus, as he tended to do, widened the circle of God’s compassion, noting that according to their own scriptures mercy had been shown to foreigners and pagans. Instantly the people turned from praise to violent hostility, thinking quite reasonably that the oracle of rescue and restoration was a promise made to them, to embattled Zion. There is an irony in this kind of response, after the hearing of this tender and beautiful poetry, that is a thumbnail history of the reception of Scripture in every generation. Nevertheless, we learn from this moment that Jesus, a pious young man with no learning and no status, was teaching in the synagogues, and that the voice of God being heard there was full of tenderness and love, a singular truth that was always the treasure of the children of Abraham. Cf., as they say, Baal or Ishtar. So let us say that Jesus could have been very virtuous, living consistently by the light of the law and the prophets, and yet have drawn no particular attention to himself.

  I must say I am pleased by the thought that youths moved by loyalty and patriotism, and justified anxiety as well, would be diligent students of love. It is important to remember that the two commandments Jesus names as most important were given that status by Jewish scholars before him, so no scrupulous adherent could overlook them. Cultures differ radically in the things they permit and the things they forbid, even tacitly, and ours has made it very difficult to speak about love. What does it mean to love an enemy? What meaning can the word have when it is applied so generally? Though Jesus widened the circle to embrace enemies, those who, by definition, were a clear threat to the community, or to his hearers as individuals, even those who rejected this teaching would no doubt know better than we do what it would mean, what it would require. Presumably if he or she decided to accept Jesus’s restatement of the law, she or he would be able to fulfill it more satisfactorily than we can.

  All this is to say that perhaps Jesus was born when he was because at that moment Judaism was in a state of intense life, as a body of learning and an ethic, that made Jesus’s teaching important and comprehensible—to a very few, of course, and to them very imperfectly, and yet as fully as it would ever be comprehended anywhere on earth.

  * * *

  I know that many Christians make a distinction between “the God of the Old Testament” and “the God of the New Testament,” very much to the detriment of the former. The name of this heresy is Manichaeanism. It is widespread and well established now. It posits two gods in perpetual conflict, one good and one—the Creator God—evil. However modified in deference to monotheism, this idea is embedded in much modern scholarship. A great many among us feel an emphatic moral superiority to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is surely bizarre, since to say the least Jesus shows no impulse at all to dissociate himself from him.

  There is, however, a great realism in the Old Testament. It looks with a clear eye and, often, with a broken heart at the agonies of history, and it insists on wresting them into a frame of meaning. To make the Testaments equivalent as theologies of history, we must consider what the New Testament would be if it went on to chronicle the Crusades and the Inquisition, and did so with comparable honesty and realism.

  There are problems of translation that are the persistence of wor
ds whose meanings have changed since they became classic or at least conventional. One of these is, of course, love—agape in Greek, caritas in Latin, and then, in English, charity, a word which, sadly, has acquired a meaning having no inevitable connection at all with love. Then there is jealous, jealousy. Jealous and zealous come from the same Greek word, in the pre-Christian translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. They were once synonyms. Jewish translations render the corresponding Hebrew word as impassioned or passionate, which was an early meaning of the word jealous, and is still sometimes used in phrases such as “jealous of one’s reputation,” meaning intensely aware and protective of it. We see the word in Scripture and assume that the Old Testament God is governed by an emotion we are ashamed to find in ourselves. I am entirely sympathetic with attempts to preserve the classic language of the Bible, but when it is gravely misleading, not only with reference to the Hebrew Bible but even as it might have been read in English two or three centuries ago, then it should be changed. Jealous in its modern sense is deeply disparaging. It seems to justify the conception of the God of the Old Testament as crude and primitive, as many writers on the subject now assume that he was—and this, besides distorting Christianity, mightily encourages disrespect for Judaism.