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

“What is man that thou art mindful of him?” A question is more spacious than a statement, far better suited to expressing wonder. The method of the Psalmist is exuberant. He offers the heavens to our consideration, than which nothing vaster can be imagined, then diminishes them in relation to God by describing them as the work, not of his will or even of his hands, but of his fingers. There is a wonderful implication that the great moon and the innumerable stars are astonishing not for the vastnesses they fill so sparsely and illuminate so slightly, but because God should delight in making anything so small and fine as the heavens and their adornments, in every way exceeding them as he does. I have always imagined the trace of a gesture of conjuration or display left in the clouds of stars curling on themselves like smoke.

The strategy of the Psalmist is to close the infinite distance between God and humankind by confounding all notions of scale. If the great heavens are the work of God’s fingers, what is small and mortal man? The poem answers its own question this way: Man is crowned with honor and glory. He is in a singular sense what God has made him, because of the dignity God has conferred upon him, splendor of a higher order, like that of angels. The Hebrew Scriptures everywhere concede: yes, foolish; yes, guilty; yes, weak; yes, sad and bewildered. Yes, resistant to cherishing and rebellious against expectation. And yes, forever insecure at best in his vaunted dominion over creation. Then how is this dignity manifest? Surely in that God is mindful of man, in that he “visits” him — this is after all the major assertion of the whole literature. “What is man?” is asked in awe — that God should be intrigued or enchanted by him, or loyal to him. Any sufficient answer would go some way toward answering “What is God?” I think anxieties about anthropomorphism are substantially inappropriate in a tradition whose main work has been to assert and ponder human theomorphism.

When, in the Gospel of John, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, “Woman, why weepest thou?” he is using, so scholarship tells me, a term of great respect and deference. Elsewhere he addresses his mother as “woman.” I know of no other historical moment in which this word is an honorific. Of course Jesus, however he is understood, whatever powers are ascribed to him, could only use the words he found ready for use, and this must mean that over generations the culture in which he was to live his life had been preparing a certain improbable consensus about the meaning of this one word, which, in the narrative, is the first one he speaks in the new world of his restored life.

How much speculation should detail such as this be asked to bear? It is as true of these old texts as it is of anything that we do not really know what they are. I would suggest their peculiarities reflect problems of art, more than they do discrepant memory or uncertain transmission. I would suggest that they attempt to preserve a sense of Jesus’ presence, that they are evocation and portraiture first of all, meant to achieve likeness rather than precision, in the manner of art. The Old Testament is full of characterization, of great Moses, especially. But in those narratives the nature of the hero and the nature of God are separate mysteries, the second vastly overshadowing the first. In the Jesus narratives they are the same mystery, so attention dwells on him in a manner entirely unique in Scripture.

The agreement among the varying accounts is profound, more strikingly so because they differ in their particulars. For example, in all the varying accounts of his encounters with his followers after the resurrection, Jesus is concealed from them by his ordinariness — as, for that matter, he had been in life. In every instance he is among them on terms of friendship, once even making a fire and cooking supper for them. If, let us say, memories were transposed to provide eloquent detail, or even if some details were invented, it would be in the service of creating a likeness, not a history, and discrepancies would matter not at all.

To say that literal representation is different from portraiture is to make a distinction like this: Jesus, even in the interval before his ascent into heaven, did in fact address a woman with courtesy and deference. Or, it would have been like Jesus, even in the interval before his ascent into heaven, to address a woman with courtesy and deference. A statement of the second kind could easily be truer, and is certainly more meaningful, than a statement of the first kind.

How to describe the powerful old life of Scripture? As a pious child, Jesus must at some time have heard the words, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” and also the psalm that begins “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” These narratives seize their occasion. They flourished in the perception and memory of those near Jesus, and in the stories they told about him. They were clearly in his mind. More is meant by prophecy, and more by fulfillment, than that narratives shape and recur. But without them there would be neither prophecy nor fulfillment.

“Woman,” Jesus, when he had lived and died, said or would have said, using a word perhaps not used so gently since Adam was a gardener — “Woman, why weepest thou?” Mary Magdalene could hear this as the question of a kindly stranger, but it means, in fact, There is no more cause for weeping. It means, perhaps, God will wipe away all tears. “Who seekest thou?” a question of the same kind, means, She need not look farther. To Jesus, or to the writer whose account renders what he took to be implicit in the moment, these questions might be wider altogether, full of awe. How did sorrow enter the world? What would be the nature of comfort or of restitution? The scene we are given answers its own questions, and does not answer them at all. Here is Jesus, by great miracle an ordinary man, except that he carries in his body the marks of mortal injury. From whatever cosmic grandeur the moment claims for him, he speaks to the friend of his humanity with joy and kindness but also with deference, honoring her. When Mary looks at Jesus, knowing who he is, what does she see? A more amazing question — when Jesus looks at Mary, and whenever he has looked at her, what does he see? We are told that, in the days before death and sorrow, God walked of an evening in the garden he had made, that he saw his likeness in the gardeners, that he spoke with them. What can these strange stories mean? After so much time and event and so much revelation, the mystery is only compounded.

So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative — event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.

ENVIRONMENTALISM poses stark issues of survival, for humankind and for all those other tribes of creatures over which we have exercised our onerous dominion. Even undiscovered species feel the effects of our stewardship. What a thing is man.