What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  There is solid evidence that love was central to Judaism before Jesus, which is in turn evidence of their conception of God. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself—both of these greatest commandments turn on that word love, so obedience to them would require a very real understanding of its meaning. In the Gospel according to Matthew, when a young man asks Jesus what he must do to have eternal life, Jesus quotes from the Ten Commandments and from Leviticus: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The young man says, “All these I have observed,” obviously long familiar with them all. Later in Matthew, Pharisees and Sadducees intend to “entangle [Jesus] in his talk.” A lawyer asks Jesus what is the greatest commandment. Jesus answers the question a little differently here than in other places. He names “the great and first commandment,” and then the second, which he says is “like it.” In the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus quotes these commandments in response to a question put to him by a scribe. This again occurs in a context in which Pharisees and others try to “entrap him in his talk,” speaking to him as men of learning might speak to someone less favored than they. The scribe who has put the question tells him he has answered well, elaborating on Jesus’s straightforward answer, perhaps with a certain pedagogical intent. Jesus approves the scribe’s words from a higher plane than learnedness. He says, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” This assertion has the effect of a striking reversal of authority. His questioners go away, not daring to question further. In Luke, again a lawyer tests him, asking him what he should do “to inherit eternal life.” Jesus replies with a question: “What is written in the law? How do you read?” The lawyer replies with the two commandments, and Jesus says, “You have answered right.” This exchange leads to the question “Who is my neighbor?” and the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

  These could all be versions of one moment, or of separate moments. That they recur in three Gospels reflects the importance of this construction of Scripture in Jesus’s time. Clearly there is a “right answer,” an interpretation already established among the religiously instructed before Jesus has repeated it and endorsed it. Otherwise it would not be so consistently represented, and remembered by his tradition, as a test of his understanding. It should be noted that the fact of Jesus’s affirming the status of this commandment on the basis of his unique authority means that the scribes, Pharisees, and the rest had indeed arrived at a true understanding of the essence of Scripture.

  From the point of view of Scripture, his answer is not obvious. The first commandment comes from the great assertion of God’s nature—he is one—and of his profound relationship with Israel. This great commandment is given at a dramatic and definitive moment in the history of their faith and nation. What in every instance is called the second-greatest commandment is really only a part of a verse, Leviticus 19:18, which appears without special emphasis in a list of the kind one finds in Leviticus. Here is the whole verse: “You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” In its entirety, it seems to suggest that the love it commands might be selective, intended for “the sons of your own people” and amounting to a ban on revenge against them. So the stripping of the verse down to one phrase, making the commandment general or universal, is an interpretive choice already made before Jesus’s ministry began, and is already authoritative. Two things should be noted: First, the other laws that provide the verse’s immediate context are compassionate provision for the hired laborer, the poor, and the sojourner, without any narrower definition. And second, another verse in the series, Leviticus 19:33–34, says: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” When the same language requires the same response to neighbor and to stranger, which here clearly means foreigner, this might well encourage the more generalized reading the verse by itself does not sustain. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?” On the basis of the first verse he might have taken the word to mean a son of his own people. But this reading is never implied. Jesus’s parable expands the word neighbor to include foreigners, presumptive enemies—anyone, in effect, toward whom one acts lovingly, which ought to be anyone at all. When he does this, he appears to be carrying further a kind of interpretation already made of this commandment.

  The one thing to be noted above all is that Scriptural interpretation in this period had settled on one phrase in one verse out of the hundreds and hundreds of laws in the Law of Moses, and set it beside the mighty, defining “Hear, O Israel,” spoken by Moses after he has given them the Ten Commandments, and in anticipation of their entry into the promised land. Jesus again approves the pairing of the two, saying that the second of them is like the first, when on their face, in the matter of their provenance and the rhetorical emphasis given to them in the text, the two are radically unlike. Yet here we have Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, and lawyers all of one mind in virtually equating them. Christian interpretation of the Judaism of the period tends to treat it as legalistic in a negative sense, minutely scrupulous about inessential things. It would take attentive scholarship, certainly, to have singled out the commandment to love one’s neighbor in Leviticus and to have decided what was essential in it. No doubt considerable consultation would have been required to have arrived at a consensus about its singular importance. And Jesus says that on these two commandments hang the law and the prophets. All this is to make three points: that Jesus shared and participated in this tendency in Jewish thought, which may go back no further than to his much older contemporary Hillel; that the pressures under which Judaism lived in this period drove its thought toward the center of its faith rather than toward ceremonial peripheries; and that the richness of such thought supported the teaching of Jesus, his disciples, and their movement.

  What were they all talking about? First, that one must be consumed in the fullness of one’s humanity by the love of God, and second, that one should extend the fullest possible love to other people—an undefined group larger than the circle of those whom, in best cases, it is simply natural to love. The placement of this commandment, its pairing with the highest and most solemn of all laws, precludes any reading of it that would make it circumscribed or trivial. The questions with which we are left are: What does it mean to love God, and what does it mean to love another human being? John makes it clear when the claim to love is spurious. He says, “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” The Samaritan of the parable shows very practical consideration for the needs of the stranger he finds by the road. That is, he very impractically sets no limit to his own generosity. After providing for the stranger’s immediate care, he says he will return to pay any costs that exceed the amount he has left with the innkeeper. Would he know the innkeeper could be trusted? Certainly the parable suggests that prudence, that is to say, considerations of self-interest, should not be brought to bear when demands are made on one’s kindness and generosity. How we have struggled with this! Far more than with the sins we are so much readier to renounce, denounce, dramatize, scorn, conceal, and confess. And this sin, the withholding of kindness and generosity—love is the crucial word in this context—structures entire social systems and philosophies. In his letter, James says, “If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?” The pious inflection he mimics would have been familiar at any point in history. The Law of Moses makes specific, ongoing provision for the alleviation of poverty, rarely noted. The Hebrew prophets are passionate on the subject, also treating it as the standard by which faith can be tested, and the offense by which th
e favor of God can be lost. Ezekiel 16:49 says, “Behold, this is the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” This is a good illustration of the fact that there are certain sins as well as certain texts we choose not to dwell on.

  Is any of this relevant to our times? It is always relevant to any time. Thomas Aquinas quotes Ambrose: “It is the hungry man’s bread that you detain; the naked man’s cloak that you store away; the poor man’s ransom and freedom that is in the money which you bury in the ground.” And, “He who spends too much is a robber.” And, “It is no less a crime to refuse to help the needy when you are able and prosperous than it is to take away someone else’s property.” Economic polarization was perhaps more visible in his world than in ours, for those of us who live in wealthier countries away from the war zones, though it is certainly here, too. There is now a great deal of prestige associated with being far wealthier than anyone ought to be.

  I haven’t wandered from my subject. I am simply pondering the fact that in Scripture the proof of loving God is so typically material generosity toward those in need, together with the fact that the burden they are taken to be always feels new and onerous to us. A particular, tender solicitude is characteristic of God, from the Law of Moses, where he insists that the poor man should have a garment to sleep under; to the prophecy of Isaiah, which foresees a blessed time when there will no longer be infants who live only a few days; to Jesus’s promise of rest to those who labor and are heavy laden, and his explicit identification with the hungry, the naked, the thirsty, the imprisoned. While the Code of Hammurabi includes some humane laws among many others, it was claimed by that king as his work, his wisdom. Divine origins are claimed for the Law of Moses, which is therefore a revelation of the divine nature. “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live” is a problem from this point of view, supporting a dark vision of the Old Testament God. And it is also, of all these laws, one Christendom embraced and applied over centuries with notorious zeal, oblivious to those limits on punishments, notably for theft, which would have saved hundreds of thousands of European lives, or those laws against theft of human beings, which would have saved millions of African lives. Selection and emphasis are of obvious significance, and, as I have said, Judaism in the time of Jesus had chosen from the mass of the Torah, and identified as the essence of it, a single sentence from a single verse: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

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  The movement that came to be called Christianity is reflected in its earliest days in the Epistles. It spread into the ancient world before the Gospels were written. So the letters to these early congregations give us a sense of what first attracted people to the movement. The letters are very highly ethical. Their ethos is summed up by Peter in two words: “Honor everyone.” James gives these instructions: “If you really fulfill the royal law, according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you do well. But if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors.” By partiality he means favoritism toward the rich. He is emphatic on this point. By the scriptures he means the law and the prophets, since the Christian Scriptures would not have existed at this point. His egalitarianism and his ethics are based in the divine image, which makes the honor owed to God and that owed to men simultaneous. He says of the tongue, “With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brethren, this ought not to be so.” The Divine Being and human beings participate in one holiness. That this can be true, that it is true, is a great part of the meaning of the Incarnation of Christ and the human life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

  It must have been wonderful to live in the newness of the faith, when John’s words could still remind his hearers what it was to see with their eyes and touch with their hands those likenesses of God among whom they were passing their lives. I didn’t intend to write an essay quite so dependent on Scripture as this one is. I know there are a great many people for whom the Bible has far less interest and authority than it has for me, many people now to whom it seems alien and incomprehensible. All this is compounded by the fact that there is a large, loud faction who represent themselves as Christians while speaking and acting with such contempt for this “royal law,” this most difficult commandment, that they have erected a sham moral system based on the principled rejection of it. My intention here has been to trace the word love, to consider what it might have meant when it came into our moral and metaphysical language, in the early Scriptures and in traditions of Christianity that are often said to be compelling to the point of entrapment, but which are consulted and invoked very rarely now, as are most things that have a place in our intellectual heritage.

  Consider these passages from another classic text, interpreting the commandment to love one’s neighbor. In our service toward others, we are “to look upon the image of God in all men, to which we owe all honor and love … Therefore, whatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him … Say ‘He is contemptible and worthless’; but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his own image. Say that you owe nothing for any service of his; but God, as it were, has put him in his own place in order that you may recognize toward him the many and great benefits with which God has bound you to himself. Say that he does not deserve even your least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of your giving yourself and all your possessions,” and much more to the same effect, concluding that, however wicked men may be, we are “to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.” This is from Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin, who is often said to be the godfather of the church of the hard heart and the closed fist, when he could not be less suited to that role. I quote Calvin because I have him at hand. He is a fascinating instance of the fact that the lens of history inverts. He says, “It is very clear that he lives the best and holiest life who lives and strives for himself as little as he can, and that no one lives in a worse or more evil manner than he who lives and strives for himself alone, and thinks about and seeks only his own advantage.” American culture is often said to be Calvinist. Maybe once it was, and maybe our once considerable generosity was owed to the fact.

  In any case, to honor and to love are virtual synonyms in all these contexts. I have read that some people feel we are entering a post-humanist era, and that this is a good thing because it will encourage us to be more sensitive to the rights of animals. I agree, at least that our civilization has lost that old impulse to value the other, and the self as well, for the beauty of human life as a phenomenon. To expect the decline of one sensitivity to enhance the rise of another one is a considerable leap of faith, certainly. I have seen no evidence of it. And in fact much of the human world is engulfed in suffering. Be that as it may, it is not unusual now to hear that humanism, the centrality of the human in our culture and civilization, is a destructive error, species-ism. This kind of thinking has an audience only because our respect for humankind has declined already.

  What has it consisted of, over all those years since the Renaissance? It had beginnings in classical antiquity. “Certain philosophers … long ago not ineptly called man a microcosm because he is a rare example of God’s power, goodness, and wisdom, and contains within himself enough miracles to occupy our minds, if only we are not irked at paying attention to them … For each one undoubtedly feels the heavenly grace that quickens him. Indeed, if there is no need to go outside ourselves to comprehend God, what pardon will the indolence of that man deserve who is loath to descend within himself to find God?” This is Calvin, writing in the sixteenth century. And this is Shakespeare, writing in the seventeenth century, and expressing something of Calvin’s exasperation at the bri
lliance and sublimity of what the human creature is, and yet somehow refuses to be: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.” Hamlet says this as he absorbs the fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have attempted to deceive him, that he has irksome Polonius to deal with. And here is John Flavel, a seventeenth-century English Puritan preacher: “The mind passes through all the works of creation, it views the several creatures on earth, considers the fabric, use and beauty of animals, the signatures of plants, penetrating thereby into their nature and virtues … It can, in a moment, mount itself from earth to heaven, view the face thereof, describe the motions of the sun in the ecliptic, calculate tables for the motions of the planets and fixed stars,” and so on. These varieties of brilliance are certainly not less characteristic of humankind than they were when the Renaissance celebrated them, when the Reformation cited them as marks of the divinity in man. Finally, these lines are Emily Dickinson’s. She begins: “The brain is wider than the sky” … “The brain is deeper than the sea,” then, “The brain is just the weight of God, / For, lift them, pound for pound, / And they will differ, if they do, / As syllable from sound.” Our own earlier tradition is largely lost to us because we have forgotten the humanist content of both the Renaissance and the Reformation.