Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Providential is fairly exactly what Jonathan Edwards meant by arbitrary. He argued that the aspects of experience that seemed then and seem so far to be inexplicable, for example, the persistence of identity over time, express no intrinsic necessity but, instead, the active intention of God. A discipline of modern thinking is the assumption that if a thing is not explained, then in good time science will explain it. Therefore the thing, the self, for example is, for all purposes, explained, insofar as its complexity or elusiveness might otherwise reflect on the nature of existence. The phenomenon of consciousness is no different in this regard from the attractive power of amber. The triumphalist tone of people who speak as if from the posture of science comes from the notion that if the imperium of science has not yet spread to every aspect of existence it might as well have, taming and enlightening every corner where superstition might lurk. I do not, by the way, find this attitude among actual scientists. The word “explain” is typically used in scientistic contexts as a synonym for the much more tentative word “describe.” It is a triumph of science to have, in some degree, described the electron, and preposterous to suggest it has been explained.

I have spent all this time clearing the ground so that I can say, and be understood to mean, without reservation, that I believe in a divine Creation, and in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and the life to come. I take the Christian mythos to be a special revelation of a general truth, that truth being the ontological centrality of humankind in the created order, with its theological corollary, the profound and unique sacredness of human beings as such. The arbitrariness of our circumstance frees me to say that the Arbiter of our being might well act toward us freely, break in on us, present us with radical Truth in forms and figures we can radically comprehend.

I have mentioned my recent bout of obsessions and intensities. Shakespeare has been very much on my mind, to my surprise. I studied him in graduate school, then put him aside entirely for decades until something stirred in my brain a few months ago. This happened as I was finishing a novel, writing the end of it, which ought to have been obsession enough. But it is very tiring to write, and naps and walks are an important part of my working life. Now that I have acquired every respectable video I can find of productions of Shakespeare, I watch them when I am tired, and they refresh me more satisfyingly than sleep. I am predisposed to attend to the plays as theology, among other things. I have found this kind of attention to them spectacularly fruitful. The Tempest takes us as far into the thinnest upper atmosphere as anything I know, whether art, metaphysics, or theology. Since Shakespeare was active during a period of sectarian turmoil and controversy, attention to the religious element in his plays tends to focus on the question of his loyalty to one side or the other, Catholic, Anglican, or Protestant. But his history plays are proof of his awareness that England was entirely capable of violent turmoil without there being anything so interesting as religious controversy involved in it. The great central concepts of Christianity were in dispute while he lived, and this would have been interesting in itself, putting aside the question of his alignment with positions articulated by others. Out of it all, I propose, he drew a powerful vision and aesthetic, of a grace that transcends even the most embittered differences. The great scenes of reconciliation that conclude so many of his plays are moments of Shakespearean grace.

For my purposes here I wish to draw attention to the scenes of recognition that are the prelude to reconciliation. When Lear is reunited with Cordelia, Leontes with Hermione, Posthumus with Imogen, the qualities of the despised and lost, which are constant from the beginning, are only truly perceived and valued after the terrible alienation has ended. The contrivances of plot that bring these reunions about are treated as providential and the scenes themselves have a religious radiance and intensity, though the worlds of all these plays are non-Christian. Again and again they tell us really to see the people we thought we knew, and really to feel the sanctity of the bonds we think we cherish. They open onto the inarticulable richness concealed in the garments of the ordinary — in the manner of Christianity, properly understood. Death has a very similar effect in Shakespeare. His characters question the reality of the whole world of experience, but not of their own souls. Beyond the accidents of hate and harm that distract and corrupt us, there is grace, reality indeed, in whose light all such things simply fall away. The plays make a distinction between mercy, which is given in despite of faults, and grace, for whom no fault exists. When Lear tells Cordelia she has reasons not to love him, she says, “No cause, no cause.” When the villain Iachimo kneels to Posthumus for forgiveness, Posthumus says, “Kneel not to me; The power that I have on you is, to spare you; The malice towards you to forgive you: live, and deal with others better.” In the great age of the revenge play, this visionary aloofness to the very thought of revenge is striking, certainly. So it would be now. If the world is indeed arbitrary, temporal in this sense, then an absolute reality would have no traffic with its accidents, our errors and confusions. Heaven make us free of them.

I find Shakespeare confirming that late, vivid sense of mine that everything is much more than itself, as commonly reckoned, and that this imaginary island is the haunt of real souls, sacred as they will ever be, though now we hardly know what this means. Paul says we may take the created order as a revelation of God’s nature. We know now that there is another reality, beyond the grasp of our comprehension yet wholly immanent in all of Being, powerful in every sense of the word, invisible to our sight, silent to our hearing, foolish to our wisdom, yet somehow steadfast, allowing us our days and years. This is more than metaphor. It is a clear-eyed look at our circumstance. Let us say that this quasireality is accommodated to our limitations in ways that allow us an extraordinary efficacy. To me this would imply a vast solicitude, and a divine delight in us as well.

The Prologue to the strange play Pericles, Prince of Tyre says the tale it tells is an old song, sung, among its other benign effects, “to make men glorious.” Again, this tale ends in recognition and restoration. Pericles is stirred from his trance of grief by the voice of a daughter he has not known, whose voice he has never heard. Thinking her dead, he has given way to utter sorrow. So her being restored to him is like resurrection. He sees her as he might never have seen her — miraculously herself. The tale “makes men glorious” by allowing plausibility to drop away in profound deference to human particularity, human love and loyalty and worth. I take these pious pagans to be living out a meditation on the meeting in the Garden, the supper at Emmaus. Our love and hope are sacred, and existence honors and will honor them though the heavens finally roll up like a scroll.

All the great Christians have said we must be humble. This should be easier for us moderns, knowing what we know. Of course we have been anticipated, by the psalmist, by the Job writer. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Here we stand staring beyond the great mysteries we have opened, having stepped to the threshold of still profounder mysteries. We can look far back in time. This is remarkable. Indeed, where the cosmos is concerned we can only look back in time. This is also remarkable. We don’t know what time is, of course, but we do know that it is not symmetrical. It goes in one direction. We look into the deep past, a maelstrom of sorts, in which time changes its nature, then perhaps disappears altogether. We can only conclude that we have our origins in this unfathomable storm, mundane creatures that we are, rumpled, trivial, tedious, our minds full of flotsam and small grudges, yet creatures somehow profound enough to have made our way nearly to the verge of creation, even as we fly farther from it into a future governed by forces that are dark to us. I have read that there was a moment well into cosmic history when the expansion of the universe abruptly accelerated. I have read that its rate of acceleration continues to accelerate. This is at odds with expectation. Now we have antigravity to account for it, an explanation that would be more satisfying if we had any understanding of the nature of gravity. If over time the universe can change radically, then it can change again. The conditions now friendly to life on earth, since they seem to be rather finely calibrated, could shift a little and then the universe would be done with us, our vanishing no event at all as things are reckoned at these scales. There would be no one to attempt a reckoning, no one to speak the word “event.” Light would be darkness without eyes to see it, I suppose, but, in the nature of the case, this would be a matter of no consequence. Our brilliance has shown us grounds for utter humility. We could vanish into the ether like a breath, leaving nothing behind to say who we were, even that we were. No doubt we will vanish in fact, mere transients in a cosmos that will realize itself over eons.