I hereby declare Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead mandatory reading for all pomocons or those who are considering converting (although Robinson herself does not appear at this time to have faced the inconvenient fact that she is one of us). This book is first of all the fictional Reverend John Ames’ singularly beautiful celebration of the holiness of ordinary life. The respectable Iowa minister sees the incarnation of eternity, its penetration into time, its distillation and crystallization in the most delicate details of each particular existence, with truly unforgettable clarity and inexhaustible gratitude.
Somehow this love of the world is not undermined but intensified by faith in a God who (as a good Calvinist holds) radically transcends the world. This intensification is presented with mysterious and unforgettable power in an early scene in which young Ames and his father pray at the grave of his grandfather. The boy opens his eyes to behold an exquisite play of light between setting sun and rising moon, “palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them,” each shimmering disc resting just on the horizon, their communion defining a west-east axis. To interrupt a prayer for this vision would not be an interruption. In a supremely lovely gesture, the boy gets his praying father’s attention by kissing his hand. As the flow of time was suspended while the luminous orbs “seemed to float on the horizon,” the three generations appear in a sacred light neither quite solar nor lunar, just grave, father, and son – an infinitely particular past, present, and future – positioned precisely at the heart of Being. “And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t give much thought to the nature of the horizon.” (14-15)
The political themes of Gilead may not at first appear essential. But on reflection it seems to me that this exquisite novel raises deep political-theological questions. Calvin’s anti-dualistic legacy taught generations to savor the holiness of the ordinary. But once this sensibility was severed from the transformative social and therefore political vision that linked the Puritans to the abolitionists, or once this vision was usurped by a frankly secular progressivism, then there was no one left bravely to take political, philosophical, or theological responsibility for a world or for a regime in which the ordinary could come to light as extraordinary.
Whether the transcendence of the ordinary can be sustained without the help of brave people in a brave country in sustaining a cosmos where the noonday sun defines a vertical dimension of high and low is the question Robinson has raised for me. We still have not given enough “thought to the nature of the horizon.”
This much to prepare for upcoming remarks on (or questions concerning) Robinson’s latest, Home.
October 3rd, 2008 | 10:48 pm
Ralph, I’d be interested in your take on this review by Ruth Franklin, if you have the time or interest.
I haven’t read Home yet. I began Gilead earlier this year, but I didn’t have the time to appreciate the language and the rhythm of the book as I ought. I hope to get back to it sometime soon.
October 4th, 2008 | 9:24 am
This, of course, is a fabulous comment about one of our deepest writers–the Calvinist alternative to Percy and Flannery O’Connor. I wonder if Percy and O’Connor might wonder whether the utopian transformationalism associated with abolitionism might have already produced some detachment from the mysterious wonders that shine forth even or especially in ordinary human life. I’m not saying, of course, that racially based slavery was anything but really, really evil. But one reason neo-Puritanism disappeared after the Civil War was disappointment with its REAL and therefore LIMITED results.
October 4th, 2008 | 9:52 am
Ralph and Peter,
Could you please back up and flesh out what the ingrained puritanism in Robinson’s fiction, as well as the Catholicism of Percy and O’Connor, have to say or imply about the politics of abolition?
I am a fan of all three writers, and interested in what you are saying, but you guys lost me.
October 4th, 2008 | 12:38 pm
And both Percy and MR would be alternatives to the Greek view of transcendence which managed, paradoxically, to be entirely detached from worldly eros but still stultifyingly immanent…is the American take on eros more Percy inspired than MR inspired?
October 4th, 2008 | 3:35 pm
Russell, thanks for the Franklin link — that’s a very fine review I recommend to all our readers, and one that encompasses all three of Robinson’s novels. Franklin’s praise is generous and deserved, and her more critical or mixed judgments are more than reasonable. In fact I share Frankliln’s frustration with what might be called the self-limitation and reserve of Robinson’s writing, but I’m not sure that in the end it is not essential to what she is doing – to the humility and postmodernity of her fiction: there is no encompassing vision, only visionary glimpses and an exquisite sense of the mysterious relationship between our fallenness and our participation in an infinite goodness. At the same time, I wonder what it is that makes it impossible for Jack to repent and to reconcile with God, and with his family and with his community. I’ll try to say more about this in a post on HOME.
Mark, I don’t know the answer, and I confess to being deliberately allusive and elusive in order to provoke thought (including my own). But the question for me surrounds the relation between revelations of transcendence and the goodness of this world, our home. Robinson is a singular master at evoking this relation. The Calvinist radicalization of transcendence in a way paradoxically reveals or liberates the holiness of the ordinary. (Can one say the same of a parallel Pascalian-O’Connoresque radicalization?) But must not this mysterious transcendence find articulation in some “laws of moral analogy” (Tocqueville’s evocative and perhaps remotely Thomist formulation), some at least residually hierarchical (world-ordering) and therefore inevitably political engagement with the world? Here I may be slower to leave the Greeks behind than Ivan: the immanent claims of detachment may be insuperable (thus my perhaps one-sided but I think valid critique of Calvin in my obscure youthful work): throw Aristotle and pride and politics out with a pitchfork, and they are blown back in with a blind progressive transformative fury. As, perhaps, in abolitionism. But the exhaustion of progressive, political Calvinism has left the town of Gilead with only a progressively privatized piety, one that cannot stand up for itself, one that risks degenerating into mere respectability and decorum — before it is blown away. It is not all Jack’s fault that he cannot find balm in Gilead.
October 4th, 2008 | 3:58 pm
If only someone would write a paper on Robinson’s Calvin being a response to modern dualism.
October 4th, 2008 | 4:25 pm
Could someone would send me that paper, as promised?
October 4th, 2008 | 4:27 pm
As Ralph says, without the POLITICAL REALISM of ARISTOTLE and Thomas, even we Christians can be too subject to progressive transformational fury.
October 4th, 2008 | 5:56 pm
Re: transformational fury, see my post just now at the Confab on Gerson. Ay carumba.
February 13th, 2012 | 9:49 am
[...] two of the best novels of the past decade, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home. At their core, these are conservative works: they detail family, faith, and community [...]
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