Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

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Lately I have been watching ghosts — the ghost of the young Olivier playing a wistful and inward and elegant Hamlet, the ghost of the old Olivier playing a Lear mightily bemused by mortality. And, most movingly, I have seen the ghost of the lithe young prince in the eyes of the age-ruined king. How remarkable it is that we can summon these spirits, head to foot as they lived, perfect in every gesture and inflection. All our best art is the art of conjurers, calling up likenesses, inviting recognition, their praise and vindication being that they may have made something true to life. The actor playing an actor weeps for Hecuba. And we will weep for Hamlet, for everything we recognize in Hamlet. So slight a thing as a thought can assume weight and dimension through so slight a thing as a word. Great meaning can be contoured by a glance. This in the earthy atmosphere we all breathe, the here and now. It is elusive to us, like other great realities, like time and space and gravity. And it is the haunt of souls. We know who might look up at us from any injury we do or allow to be done. A soul, in its untouchable authority. It is an authority made good, Jesus tells us, when the Son of Man appears in his glory — that same son of man who has appeared to each of us a thousand times in the raiment of sorrow and need. The same son of man who has done us ten thousand kindnesses we have not noticed to acknowledge. The same son of man who moves our hearts to kindness, when we are moved.

Some of us have believed that a treasury of merit, in the gift of a church, can compensate for our failures and our deficiencies, our sins. Some of us have believed that only divine grace, in the gift of God, can make good our shortcomings. But what does any of this mean? Does it mean that the grand cosmos is so ordered that in the best case some of us might ’scape whipping? This does not seem to me to reflect well on the Creator. And granting the magnificence of Creation, which we have hardly begun to comprehend, and our extraordinary place in it, surely it is all about more than these traditional preoccupations encourage us to think. I do believe we blaspheme when we wrong or offend another human being. And I understand that, over the millennia, this continuous, often outrageous blaspheming has put a vast, unspent stress on the order of things. But the other side of this same reality is the great fact that human beings are sacred things whom it is indeed blasphemy to wrong. Only think what we are, then why God might have a fondness for us. Think that God is loyal to us, and then what, in ultimate terms, we must be. I have no problem with the word “sin.” I think it is one of our most brilliant evasions to have associated sin so strongly with sexuality that we can be coy about it, or narrowly obsessed with it, or we can dismiss it as a synonym for prudery, as we go on hating and reviling, as we go on grinding the faces of the poor. We alone among the animals can sin — one of our truly notable distinctions. Or, to put it another way — we are the only creatures who are, in principle if seldom in fact, morally competent. Responsible, or at least answerable.

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There is a sense in which the life of Jesus reiterates the implication of God in Creation. So when I read about apocalypse I cannot think of it otherwise than as an epochal moment in the life of the living God. I know this statement is full of problems. In the nature of things there is an awkwardness in applying time-bound language to the eternal, and yet that is the problem God gives us in making himself known to us, if we assume that there is a God and that he is indeed mindful of us. The word “time” is a problem in itself. Creation did not exist and then it did, emerging out of and into what greater reality God knows. At a particular moment Jesus came into the world. And at some particular hour when we least expect it, a veil will be lifted and there will be an ending and a beginning, creation purged, healed, and renewed, afterward forever in a new and right relationship to God, who so loves the world. The clocks will stop, and we will find ourselves on the threshold of the everlasting. There is an ambiguous relationship between judgment and revelation, which has caused us to put the emphasis in the wrong place, that is, on judgment. Divine judgment implies a true and absolute understanding of the nature of transgression, which would be a great revelation, certainly. Grace itself, if it is nontrivial, must also have its meaning with a final recognition of what has been at stake here. For this reason Jesus is, from birth to death, a figure of judgment, an apocalyptic figure. And, therefore, so, by the grace of God, are we all.

Here is a question: If the soul is embodied, how does it survive the death of the body? Well, if the human self is information, as the talk of computer-mediated immortality seems to assume, and if information cannot pass out of the universe, as I read elsewhere, then presto! we have a theory — which I do not credit for a moment. My point is simply that finding the true boundaries of credibility is not nearly so easy for us moderns as it has been thought to be by previous generations. For myself, I have no more to say on the subject than that the resurrected Jesus let Thomas touch his wounds. If substance is only energy in a particular state, then the opposition of soul and body is a false opposition, and our passing through nature to eternity a different thing than we imagine. Suppose that the body is more wonderful than it is frail or flawed or full of appetites. The hairs on our heads are numbered, after all. We might be tempted to think of Paradise as a place where language would be unneeded since everything would be known. Doubt would be extinct, goodness would lack the shading of darker possibilities. We know ourselves in struggles and temptations, and what would remain of our selves if these were no longer the terms of our existence? Something more interesting, no doubt, some purer discovery of what a self might be. Perhaps we could trust God that far — to give us a heaven better than earth — if we really did value human beings enough to believe he values them.

I share Calvin’s view, that this world is what God gives us to know, that our thoughts about eternity can never rise above speculation. So we are certain to distract and mislead ourselves. The rest really is silence. If we think of the other potentialities for Being we are aware of now, and the degree to which our present reality is arbitrarily constituted, first in itself and then because of the limits of our knowledge and our means of knowing, it is not hard to imagine that another reality might be, for our purposes, inarticulable. I am speaking metaphorically here. I do not want to saddle science with theology. My meaning is simply that while science has shown us our powers, it has also shown us our limitations. Try to find a book on quantum theory that does not begin with a confession of bewilderment. And quantum theory is an account of the ways of the reality we inhabit and feel we know. My point is not that our thinking should be formed by contemporary science, but that it should not be formed, as it has been, by primitive and discredited ideas, whether scientific or commonsensical. Cynics mock the notions that hover around immortality, and as usual they have a point.

Speculation about the afterlife has had a very long history. It has in some cases become dogma, or else commonplace, which is more fixed than dogma. Pagan sky gods would feel at home in some precincts of it. Understandably, it has been a projection of this world minus time, earthly grandeur much aggrandized. Rest and plenty and companionship with Jesus and with those one has loved — however these might be changed in new circumstances, in essence we might recognize them because God loves and God provides and God has put his particular blessing on rest. These graces are elements of present life, or they can be. If we construct beyond this point, we have impossibilities to deal with. How can the dead live again? We will see. Why should they live again, motley and cantankerous as they have been for the most part? Because God values them. And he is the God not of the dead but of the living.