Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

Theology of the period of Cauvin employs a characteristic language which discredits it in the eyes of modern readers, including extreme disparagements of the physical body, and more generally of humankind under the aspect of sin or fallenness. The first thing that must be borne in mind is that those who wrote in such terms, whether Cauvin or Luther or John of the Cross, did it in the service of an extraordinarily exalted vision of the human soul. It is a form of hyperbole — purity is corruption, pleasure is illusion, wisdom is folly, virtue is depravity, by comparison with the holiness that can be imagined, not as the nature of God only, but as the nature of humankind also, whom — in the translation of Psalm 8 in the Geneva Bible, a sixteenth-century English Bible assembled, annotated, and printed by English Calvinist exiles in Geneva — God has made “a little lower than God, and crowned him with glory and worship.”

The self-abnegation that is always the condition of a true perception of the self or of God can only be understood as the rigorous imagination of a higher self. This is more complex than it sounds. Cauvin has an unsettling habit of referring to himself or to any human being as a “worm.” His readers would have known that the speaker of Psalm 22 uses this word to describe himself. That is the psalm Jesus recites from the cross, and Christian interpreters have always identified the speaker of the psalm with Christ. So the use of the word describes temporal estrangement from God and at the same time ultimate identity with Christ. In context it is the farthest thing from a term of contempt. In Book I of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Cauvin says, “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?” He argues passionately that humankind is itself a sufficient revelation of the divine presence:

How detestable, I ask you, is this madness: that man, finding God in his body and soul a hundred times, on this very pretense of excellence denies that there is a God? They will not say it is by chance that they are distinct from brute creatures. Yet they set God aside, the while using “nature,” which for them is the artificer of all things, as a cloak. They see such exquisite workmanship in their individual members, from mouth and eyes to their very toenails. Here also they substitute nature for God. But such agile motions of the soul, such excellent faculties, such rare gifts, especially bear upon the face of them a divinity that does not allow itself readily to be hidden.

This is humankind in its fallen state. We have today no comparable language for celebrating human gifts and graces, and no comparable awareness of them, or pleasure in them. The disparagement of “the flesh” is one half, an intrinsic part, of an assertion about human nature which exalts it above all perceivable reality. Modern scholars point to the language of extreme disparagement as if it were exactly what it is not, inhumane and world-hating. It is true that Christian tradition has sometimes approved extreme asceticism in service of the “mortification of the flesh.” Cauvin forbade such practices, because in his view sinfulness is not associated with the physical body more than with the whole of the mortal state, and no effort of ours can free us from it. Still, he retained the language of self-disparagement, and the discipline of self-perception implied in it is as essential to his understanding of religious experience as it is to the vision of any mystic.

Since Calvinism is associated with a brooding preoccupation with fallenness, it is worth pointing out that Cauvin considered the Fall of Man to be, on balance, a good thing. As a result of it, God’s grace “is more abundantly poured forth, through Christ, upon the world, than it was imparted to Adam in the beginning.” His commentary on Genesis, completed the year before his death, is a joyful and effusive work, in which he relaxes the discipline of brevity which so strongly marks his earlier exegetical writing. It is touching to find this sick and weary man so eager to call Creation good.

Nor does he find in the Fall any grounds for antipathy toward women. He sees it as a grave sin in Adam that he tried to blame Eve: “Adam, not otherwise than knowingly and willingly, had set himself, as a rebel, against God. Yet, just as if conscious of no evil, he puts his wife as the guilty party in his place.” He says that Eve, equally with Adam, was made in the image of God “respecting that glory of God which peculiarly shines forth in human nature, where the mind, the will and all the senses, represent the Divine order.” Of her creation from Adam’s rib he says, “He lost, therefore, one of his ribs; but, instead of it, a far richer reward was granted him, since he gained a faithful associate of life; for he now saw himself, who had before been imperfect, rendered complete in his wife … Moses also designedly used the word built, to teach us that in the person of the woman the human race was at length complete, which had before been like a building just begun.” He is at special pains to dissociate human propagation from sin. Commenting on Genesis 1:28, in which God blesses Adam and Eve and tells them to “be fruitful and multiply,” he says, “This blessing of God may be regarded as the source from which the human race has flowed … here Moses would simply declare that Adam with his wife was formed for the production of offspring, in order that men might replenish the earth. God could himself indeed have covered the earth with a multitude of men; but it was his will that we should proceed from one fountain, in order that our desire of mutual concord might be the greater, and that each might the more freely embrace the other as his own flesh.” Marriage is “the bond which God has preferred to all others.”

In this Calvin entirely rejects Augustine, whom he follows in many other things, and embraces Chrysostom, who also influenced his theology profoundly. Augustine says, “A good Christian is found in one and the same woman to love the creature of God, whom he desires to be transformed and renewed; but to hate the corruptible and mortal conjugal connection and sexual intercourse: i.e. to love in her what is characteristic of a human being, to hate what belongs to her as a wife … This is to be understood of father and mother and the other ties of blood, that we hate in them what has fallen to the lot of the human race in being born and dying, but that we love what can be carried along with us to those realms where no one says, My Father; but all say to the one God, ‘Our Father.’”

But Chrysostom writes, “For why do we not all spring out of the earth?… In order that both the birth and the bringing up of children, and the being born of one another, might bind us mutually together … Whence also many kinds of affection arise. For one we love as a father, another as a grandfather; one as a mother, another as a nurse … And He devised also another foundation of affection. For having forbidden the marriage of kindred, he led us out unto strangers and drew them to us again … uniting together whole families by the single person of the bride, and mingling entire races with races.” On one hand Cauvin rarely innovates, and never claims to. On the other hand, his singular devotion to the literature of theology prepared him to exploit its great richness.

In the matter of human dominion over the earth, Cauvin remarks Calvinistically that in giving man the earth to cultivate, God “condemned, in his person, all indolent repose.” Then he says:

Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence; but let him endeavor to hand it down to posterity as he received it, or even better cultivated. Let him so feed on its fruits, that he neither dissipates it by luxury, nor permits it to be marred or ruined by neglect. Moreover, that this economy, and this diligence, with respect to those good things God has given us to enjoy, may flourish among us; let every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. Then he will neither conduct himself dissolutely, nor corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved.