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

The consequences of the sharp correction against dualism in these two poems of Marguerite’s are notable. Luther seems to have been entirely at ease with the devil, allowing him a very great place in theology and in life. But in Marguerite’s poems, though they are both about sin and fallenness, there is no Satan, no tempter, no adversary, no external source of evil at all. In the first lines of the title poem, the soul cries out for a hell infernal enough to punish a tenth of its sins, a startling assertion of the primacy of subjective experience, over against the claims of the actual terrors of an objectively existing hell. By contrast, Ignatius of Loyola begs for “a deep sense of the pain which the lost suffer, that if because of my faults I forget the love of the eternal Lord, at least the fear of these punishments will keep me from falling into sin.” There is frustration, astonishment, and grief in the voices of Marguerite’s poems, but no fear or suspense, because there is nothing external to the soul but the Lord, whose grace need not be doubted. There is, in effect, only one narrative, always complete, irrespective of any particular sin or error. In this, Marguerite anticipates Cauvin, who believes in eternal reprobation, but who never seems to allow himself to imagine it. She may also anticipate the sect called the Libertines, who taught, according to Cauvin, that devils are “nothing but evil inspirations,” a view he denounced. Nevertheless he mentions Satan rarely, preferring, as Marguerite does, to ponder discords within the soul, and he gives short shrift to hell — one long paragraph in the fifteen hundred pages of the final version of the Institutes. This is not how he is thought of. Whether his tradition parted with him in these matters or whether it also has been misinterpreted or misrepresented, he did not encourage any special interest in damnation.

Finally, in her book about the sinful soul, Marguerite mentions Eve twice, once in passing and once because her name occurs in the prayer Salve Regina, which she translates into French, with Christ as mediator in place of Mary, conforming the prayer to Lutheran or Protestant teaching. Eve has no special role in the Fall, no special weakness to predispose her to it, no special liabilities as a consequence of it — fallenness as a parable of gender is not in any way touched upon. The soul who speaks could be, humanly speaking, male or female, Adam or Eve. In the whole of the Institutes, Cauvin will not mention Eve once, even in passing. As a consequence, the thought that women carry any special burden of guilt or sinfulness cannot even arise, nor can the thought that sin bears any special relation to sexuality. This permits Cauvin to speak as he does of marriage, and it is one reason for the high status women have traditionally enjoyed in Calvinist cultures.

The profound isolation of the soul, which seems so fearful to those to whom it does not seem true, so daunting to those for whom it is not exhilarating, is fully present in Marguerite’s poems years before the word “Calvinism” would be uttered. It is an aspect of the doctrine attributed to John Calvin which is supposed to reflect the contemptible harshness of his disposition. But what if he learned it from the earthy, worldly, indulgent sister of the king? One need imagine no more than that some Paris acquaintance lent him her book. Considering her prominence among literary and intellectual people, the life-and-death importance to the Reform movement of her active sympathy, the boldness of the publication then of poetry based on translation of Scripture into French, the startling response of the Sorbonne — surely The Sinful Soul would have been read with great interest. One account of the events that forced Cauvin to leave Paris was that he may have helped Nicolas Cop write a lecture which defended the book.

When the soul in Marguerite’s poems calls itself Rien, it must be remembered that the imagination behind it is that of someone who enjoyed extraordinary privilege. Marguerite’s mother, Louise de Savoie, was régente of France during the childhood of her son François, and one of the great women of Europe who met in 1529 to negotiate the Paix des Dames, which brought to an end years of intractable warfare. After her brother the king was captured in a failed military venture in Italy, Marguerite herself went to Madrid to negotiate his release from prison. She spent her adult life steadily and tactfully forming the French Renaissance. That is to say, when, in the person of the soul, she renounces every claim to estimation, she is renouncing a very great deal, and that is the point. The soul participates in the nature of the eternal by putting aside the temporal, that is, everything it can know of itself. Power and erudition are of no more account than ignorance and weakness. It is only as nothing that the soul can be without limitation. Its true or essential being is in relation to God, toward whom it exists in the roles God affords to it — in Marguerite’s poem “Mirror of the Sinful Soul,” the very lofty roles of sister, mother, son, spouse. The soul is a perceiver upon whom perception is visited — “the gift whereof the virtue is unknown to my little power.” What is described is not the diminishing of the self, but an imagination of it enlarged and exalted far beyond what is within its power to imagine or to desire.

In his commentary on Genesis, Cauvin will describe heaven (which he almost never does) in these terms: “[T]he earth, with its supply of fruits for our daily nourishment, is not there set before us; but Christ offers himself unto life eternal. Nor does heaven, by the shining of the sun and the stars, enlighten our bodily eyes, but the same Christ, the Light of the World and the Sun of Righteousness, shines into our souls; neither does the air stretch out its empty space for us to breathe in, but the Spirit of God quickens us and causes us to live. There, in short, the invisible kingdom of Christ fills all things, and his spiritual grace is diffused through all.” Heaven’s essence for him is that it is inconceivable in the world’s terms, another order of experience. This is true even though his conception of this world is utterly visionary. He says that while God is not to be seen “in his unveiled essence” he “clothes himself, so to speak, in the image of the world, in which he would present himself to our contemplation … arrayed in the incomparable vesture of the heavens and the earth…” Every understanding of the self is meaningless where the whole of existence is changed beyond our ability to conceive of it, where all understanding is of the nature of revelation, that is, of perception overwhelmed. This being true, there is no meaningful distinction to be made between one soul and the next — each one is simple, absolute soul, and as if the only soul. This is heaven without hierarchy, a very revolutionary idea. It privileges anyone’s relationship with God above any other loyalty or duty.

Christ, in Marguerite’s “Mirror of the Sinful Soul,” is brother (or sister), never king: “[W]e seeing him to be called man, we are bold to call him sister and brother. Now the soul which may say of herself, that she is the sister of God, ought to have her heart assured.” She makes the perspective of the whole of humankind, without condition or distinction, one of privileged intimacy with God. Her insistence on the sinfulness of the soul as a condition of its humanity — Cauvin’s “total depravity” — and on the sins it sees in itself as archetypal rather than personal and singular, implies the equality of all souls. Cauvin could have found encouragement in her to address the king so bluntly, and to assert the divine right of the common folk to be protected against the abuses of kings.

John Calvin is said to have made the first extended use of French as a language of systematic thought, and to have impressed it with the restraint and lucidity of his style. He is said to have made French an international language because of the wide influence of his writing. What little is said of him tends almost always to ascribe to him truly epochal significance, for weal or woe, which he could not deserve if his thought and work were not more original by far than he ever claimed they were. So it is no disrespect to him to look elsewhere for the sources of his originality. If, as is often said, he was the greatest theologian of the Reformation, it is because he was not primarily a theologian, but a humanist, a man of letters, an admiring student of this world. His theology was so influential in part because he understood its implications in such broad terms. He reimagined civilization, as his spiritual progeny would do again and again. In her own way, Marguerite was at the same work sooner, through her patronage and her own writing, using books and languages to open other worlds, including the potent world of the modern vernacular.