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

Much of the power of an argument like Kugel’s comes from the notion that the information on which it is based is new, another one of those world-transforming thresholds, one of those bold strokes of intellect that burn the fleets of the past. This motif of a shocking newness that must startle us into painful recognition is very much a signature of “the modern,” and potent rhetorically, more so because we are conditioned to accept such claims as plausible. But it often achieves its effects by misrepresenting an earlier state of knowledge or simply failing to enquire into it. In 1622, Hugo Grotius, the renowned early legal theorist and scholar, wrote a treatise titled On the Truth of the Christian Religion . It was translated into English many times, beginning in the seventeenth century. In sections XVI and XVII Grotius argues for the truth of Genesis on precisely the grounds that other ancient cultures had their own versions of the same stories. These “testimonies of foreigners” show “that the most ancient report was so held among all nations, as the writings of Moses proclaim. For the writings on the ‘Origin of the world’ which he hath left behind, were, for the most part, the same also in the most ancient histories of the Phoenicians … partly, also found among the Indians and Egyptians … and the formation of animals, and, lastly, of man, and that, too, according to the Divine Image, is mentioned: and the dominion given to man over the other living creatures: which you may everywhere find in very many writers.” 16

I cannot claim to have found so much similarity as he does between Genesis and ancient literatures in general. My point here is simply that where similarities occur they need not be taken to compromise the authority of the biblical text, even if one cannot agree with Grotius that they can be taken to affirm it. To address Kugel’s point more specifically, Grotius is clearly aware of other ancient Near Eastern versions of the story of the Deluge. He says, “Those things which we read of, wrapped up by poets in the licence of fables, the most ancient writers had delivered according to truth, that is, agreeably to Moses, viz. — Berosus, in his history of the Chaldeans; Abydenus, in his of the Assyrians, who even mentions the dove sent forth, as doth also Plutarch, one of the Greeks.” 17Berosus was a Babylonian historian who flourished in the fourth and third centuries before the Common Era. Abydenus was a Greek historian of Assyria who wrote in the third century BCE. Fragments of their work survive in other early texts.

So there were ancient sources available to Grotius in the early seventeenth century which made clear the Babylonians and Assyrians had flood narratives that paralleled the Deluge in Genesis in some detail. Again, that this is a proof of the truth of Moses’ account, as Grotius argues it is, that it can in fact be cited in defense of Moses, is clearly open to question. But the notion very common in biblical scholarship since the nineteenth century, reiterated by James Kugel, that the existence of these ancient Mesopotamian narratives was a startling modern discovery which must inevitably raise doubts about the meaningfulness of the scriptural Deluge and about the integrity of Scripture in general is clearly false. The decline of classical learning and the mischaracterization of the nature of traditional belief are both factors in contexts like this one. Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of “the modern,” that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.

The kind of flawed learnedness required to draw attention to the biblical adaptation of the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic instance of what William James called the power of the intellect to shallow. 18Again, I mention Kugel because I have his book at hand. This kind of scholarship, tending always to the same conclusions, has dominated Old Testament studies from the middle of the nineteenth century. Kugel’s very flat statement that someone who takes a different view is “either being dishonest or has simply failed to recognize a fundamental fact” is the kind of claim to the intellectual high ground that is perhaps the most consistent feature of the kind of thought that styles itself modern.

The degree to which debunking is pursued as if it were an urgent crusade, at whatever cost to the wealth of insight into human nature that might come from attending to the record humankind has left, and without regard for the probative standards scholarship as well as science should answer to, may well be the most remarkable feature of the modern period in intellectual history.

The great breach that separates the modern Western world from its dominant traditions of religion and metaphysics is the prestige of opinion that throws into question the scale of the reality in which the mind participates. Does it open on ultimate truth, at least potentially or in momentary glimpses, or is it an extravagance of nature, brilliantly complex yet created and radically constrained by its biology and by cultural influence? Prior to any statement about the mind is an assumption about the nature of the reality of which it is part, and which is in some degree accessible to it as experience or as knowledge.

Whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history. There is something uniquely human in the fact that we can pose questions to ourselves about ourselves, and questions that actually matter, that actually change reality. What we are, what human beings are as individuals and in the categories we assign to them — our assumptions and conclusions on these subjects have had enormous consequences, which were by no means reliably good.

I should declare at the outset my own bias. I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses. I do not wish to imply malice or calculation on the part of those who insist on a definition of the mind, therefore the human person, which tends to lower us all in our own estimation. It must be obvious, however, that I consider this tendency in modern and contemporary thinking significant and also regrettable.

There is a characteristic certainty that is present structurally in the kind of thought and writing to which I wish to draw attention, a boldness that diminishes its subject. I will refer to this as parascientific literature. By this phrase I mean a robust, and surprisingly conventional, genre of social or political theory or anthropology that makes its case by proceeding, using the science of its moment, from a genesis of human nature in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and must be, together with the ethical, political, economic and/or philosophic implications to be drawn from these conclusions. Its author may or may not be a scientist himself. One of the characterizing traits of this large and burgeoning literature is its confidence that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them. This confidence was already firmly asserted by Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, in 1848. He saw his age prepared for the social regeneration of mankind: “For three centuries men of science have been unconsciously co-operating in the work. They have left no gap of any importance, except in the region of Moral and Social phenomena. And now that man’s history has been for the first time systematically considered as a whole, and has been found to be, like all other phenomena, subject to invariable laws, the preparatory labours of modern Science are ended.” 1I seriously doubt that any scientist active today, if pressed, would speak of the sufficiency of our present state of knowledge with equal assurance. Yet in literature of this genre, of which Comte is also an ancestor, that tone of certainty persists, an atavistic trait that defies the evolution of its notional subject.