Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

I was educated to believe that a threshold had indeed been crossed in the collective intellectual experience, that we had entered a realm called “modern thought,” and we must naturalize ourselves to it. We had passed through a door that could swing only one way. Major illusions had been dispelled for good and all. What we had learned from Darwin, Marx, Freud, and others were insights into reality so deep as to be ahistorical. Criticism was nostalgia, and skepticism meant the doubter’s mind was closed and fearful. To an age of doubt this ought to have seemed a naive response to any body of thought. But these ideas presented themselves as the last word in doubt, the nec plus ultra of intellectual skepticism. And so they have been regarded for generations, achieving a remarkable pertinacity through their association with epochal, and oddly immutable, change. There have always been new interpretations budding of from these seminal works, themselves budding off again and again, revisions of various sorts typically announcing with the prefix “neo-” their claim on the world’s attention, and at the same time their undiminished fealty to the school from which they might otherwise be seen to depart. The prefix “post-” signifies, of course, that they have crossed some sort of threshold, and can therefore make some new claim on the world’s attention.

The schools of thought that support the modernist consensus are profoundly incompatible with one another, so incompatible that they cannot collectively be taken to support one grand conclusion. That they are understood to have done so might reasonably be taken to suggest that this irresistible conclusion came before, perhaps inspired, the arguments that have been and still are made to support it. I propose that the core assumption that remains unchallenged and unquestioned through all the variations within the diverse traditions of “modern” thought is that the experience and testimony of the individual mind is to be explained away, excluded from consideration when any rational account is made of the nature of human being and of being altogether. In its place we have the grand projects of generalization, solemn efforts to tell our species what we are and what we are not, that were early salients of modern thought. Sociology and anthropology are two examples.

The great new truth into which modernity has delivered us is generally assumed to be that the given world is the creature of accident, that it has climbed Mount Improbable incrementally and over time through a logic of development, refinement, and elaboration internal to itself and sufficient to account exhaustively for all the complexity and variety of which reality and experience are composed. Once it was asserted, and now it is taken to have been proved, that the God of traditional Western religion does not exist, or exists at the remotest margins of time and causality. In either case, an emptiness is thought to have entered human experience with the recognition that an understanding of the physical world can develop and accelerate through disciplines of reasoning for which God is not a given.

It is usual to blame Descartes for the error that has been overcome. This is that same Descartes who proposed the pineal gland as the seat of the soul yet is blamed for creating a dichotomy between the mind/soul and the physical body, a dichotomy that has plagued Western thought, if reports are to be credited. A nonspecialist might wonder how this locating of the soul in the deep interior of the brain differs in principle from locating the moral sense in the prefrontal cortex, as contemporary writers do, to demonstrate how free they are from the errors of Descartes. 14Descartes is another threshold figure, though he is a marker for notions that have been and must be departed from. It is a given that the march of the modern has many stragglers, indeed that any of us, even the very vanguard, might backslide into Cartesianism in some unguarded moment.

The prestige of the style of thought and argument that has associated itself with science has had consequences for branches of learning that might seem to have been immune to their influence. A “science of religion,” which has been profoundly affected by the imposition of anthropological models of primitivity on this most seminal text, has had enormous consequences for Old Testament scholarship. I am reading a rather strange book titled How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now , by James L. Kugel. Kugel’s thesis is that the Bible was not in its origins a religious literature and came to be regarded as one only late in the period before the Common Era. Be that as it may. He has this to say about the similarities between the flood narratives in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis: “Someone who reads the Babylonian flood story will likely find it interesting, or perhaps troubling (because of its clear connection to the Genesis account). But any question like ‘How are we to apply its lessons to our own lives?’ would be greeted by such a reader with incomprehension, or derision. ‘Lessons? Why it was written by a bunch of Mesopotamians four thousand years ago!’ If that same person then reads what is essentially the same story in the book of Genesis but finds it full of all sorts of uplifting doctrines — well, such a person is either being dishonest or has simply failed to recognize a fundamental fact.” 15

Elegant Babylonia, Greece to Assyria’s Rome — ancient, yes, and far from primitive. There are no grounds for supposing that a “bunch of Mesopotamians” could have had nothing to tell us, or could have said nothing to interest the biblical writers, for that matter. We are entirely in the habit of finding meaning in the writings of ancient India or China or Greece. We are also familiar with the phenomenon of literary allusion. The Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian flood stories are theodicies, certainly among the earliest examples of this interesting genre. Why does catastrophe occur? What does it mean? The nature of the gods and their expectations of and feelings toward human beings are explored in these narratives.

The biblical flood tells the story again, with changes that make it monotheistic, that make the great destruction God’s response to human violence and not, as in the Babylonian versions, to the intolerable noise we make. And so on. God is loyal to us, but not because he is dependent on us, as the other gods are dependent on human beings to feed them. In other words, reframing the story is granting its given, that humankind can experience devastation, and then interpreting it in a way that radically restates the conception of God and humankind implied in it. Babylonian culture was powerful and influential. The Gilgamesh epic was found in various forms throughout the ancient Near East. It is absurd to imagine that the most dramatic part of it could simply be atched into the Hebrew Genesis and no one would notice the plagiarism. To retell their story with changes would be to defend against its pagan theological implications, and also to address what are, after all, questions of very great interest.

All this assumes that these ancients had an intellectual life, that they had meaningful awareness of surrounding cultures. Archaeological evidence of continuous contact is well established. Kugel is an Old Testament scholar, certainly better informed than I am about the brilliance of Babylonia. But the implication of the passage quoted above is that the Babylonian origins of the flood narrative exclude it from the kind of reading — for Kugel the discovery of “all sorts of uplifting doctrines”—customarily made of Scripture. The low estimate of Babylonia becomes the basis for a lowered estimate of the Hebrew Bible — the modernist declension. Assuming one narrative is without meaning, we may or must assume the other is, too. This conclusion in all its parts is perfectly arbitrary.